Rev. Swann

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.4

Heaven and Hell: Who, Where and Why? (Luke 16:19-31)

Our gospel lesson today is another of those lectionary passages I would just as soon have skipped over. First of all, I realized that if I were going to preach on it, I was first going to have explain what it is not about. It is not about heaven and hell, at least insofar as they are popularly understood or misunderstood.
In the first place, there are no coherent doctrines of either heaven or hell in the Bible. I will repeat that: there are no coherent doctrines of either heaven or hell in the Bible. Show me a “proof text” about either, and in five minutes or less I will produce two or three more that say something else. One verse, or even some verses here and there, do not make a clear-cut case, Christians--about anything, I might add.
In the second place, most popular understandings of heaven and hell are drawn not so much from the Bible, as from mythology, hymnology (particularly spirituals), John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante Aligheri’s Inferno. Much of what those who dwell on the matter of Hell believe is drawn from isolated symbolic references that do not by any means constitute a coherent doctrine, and the rest of what they believe is drawn from mythology and literature that was developed long after the writing of the Scriptures.
And in the third place, Jesus did not mention either heaven or hell in this story. He spoke of the poor man being taken into the bosom of Abraham, which is to say, united with his spiritual ancestors. These Jews, you see, thought of themselves as the children of Abraham.
In what he said about the fate of the rich man, he did not use the word “hell,” although the translators of the King James Version of the Bible rendered it that way, and a lot of readers today want to interpret it that way. In its original Greek, Luke’s Gospel uses the word “Hades,” the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew “Sheol,” which was simply the abode of the dead--all the dead. In all its uses in the Bible except this one, Hades has little if any relation to afterlife rewards or punishments. Biblically speaking, Hades is simply the Greek successor word to Sheol and means simply the grave. In fact, in the KJV version of I Corinthians 15: 55, which states, “O death, where is thy sting” O grave, where is thy victory?” the Greek word translated “grave” is “Hades.” I could go on, but that would be pointless.
The real point is that those who were listening to Jesus on the spot understood these references to the bosom of Abraham and Hades in ways that we cannot.
I.
Do I, your old preacher, believe in a heaven? I want to believe--and I do--in a state in which my identity is preserved, where God calls me by my name, and I can be in that complete and full communion with God that eludes me in this life and I can enumerate to Paul the points at which I think he got it wrong. How and where I do I think this will be, and what will the circumstances be like? I have no idea. I can’t even find a point at which to begin speculating.
I even consulted Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. Oddly, he did not offer a definition of hell, but he defined heaven this way: “A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own.”
I love astronomy and the exploration of God’s starry universe just enough to want it to have something to do with my future state, and I would like to think of myself as somehow flitting about among the stars in an afterlife. In fact, I would like for my grandchildren to think that granddad has gone to be among the stars. And I hope that God will not be offended if, as I slip away from this world, he hears me sing to him my wish contained in that popular song, “Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars. Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.”
Do I believe in a hell? I do not--most emphatically do not--believe in a hell of fire and everlasting pain, because I do not believe in a God who would do that, even to those who hate him. And yet, because God gave me free will, I must believe that I have the option of choosing eternal separation from God rather than eternal unity with God.
And still yet, I believe in a God whose mercy and capacity for forgiveness extends right up to that moment of final choice. And I must say, with Roman Catholic theologians, that we do not know that there is a single soul in hell--to which I must add, “whatever that condition may be.”
But whatever may be the case about an afterlife, I do insist that pondering the pavements of heaven or the temperature of hell is simply to waste time and mental energy speculating about the unknowable.
II.
In the day in which Jesus told this parable, there was no unanimous opinion about an afterlife--and Jesus knew that. But both men in his story died. That happens, doesn’t it? Sooner or later, rich or poor, man or woman--we all die. A rich person may get a fancier casket and a larger tombstone, but that’s about it. At the moment of death, we all fall into God’s hands to receive whatever God has waiting for us.
The Pharisees believed in an afterlife. And so they sought to earn the blessings of God and the reward of a heavenly afterlife. They thought to do it through their scrupulous adherence to the Law. By being holy, by being good--according to their own estimation of what constituted holiness and goodness--they would build up religious brownie points and be rewarded by being comfortably nestled in the bosom of Abraham. Conversely, this performance would save them from the punishment that awaited those who did not conform to their standards.
The Sadducees, the other powerful religious group, did not believe in an afterlife. They maintained that we live out our personal heavens and hells in this life, on this earth. Through the way we live our lives, we earn God’s favor, or disfavor, not by and by, but now. Thus, what comes our way in this life is what we deserve, here and now, and God leaves our day-to-day operations up to us. Unfortunately, living for today resulted in some of them living it up today.
In the story he told to his disciples, and to the Pharisees and Sadducees who were listening in, Jesus was recalling an Egyptian myth of a rich man who was punished in his afterlife for his selfishness and a poor man who found comfort in his afterlife. The Pharisees and Sadducees would have been familiar with this story, because it was discussed in several rabbinic writings they surely had studied.
Generally, to those who believed in an afterlife, Sheol was regarded in Jewish theology as simply a shadowy sort of underworld that was nothing more than a warehouse for departed souls. In later Jewish thought, Sheol was divided into two parts--one for the reward of the righteous and the other for the punishment of the unrighteous. It is within this later thought that Jesus framed his parable.
The Greek writers of the Apostles’ Creed, in the fourth century, used the word “Hades” that has been translated--mistranslated, in terms of modern English--as the “hell” into which Jesus descended. Jesus did not go to any kind of hell! He died and his body was buried in a tomb. That is the Hades, not the hell, from which Jesus arose. I prefer to say only that he descended into death; that he was dead but he lives.
III.
This one is the only parable in which any of the characters is given a name. Lazarus, the name of the poor man, is a derivative of Eleazar, which means “God is my help.” The name Dives is not a name given by Jesus; it is simply a Latin word meaning “rich man,” a word lifted from the Latin Vulgate bible and used by the later translators of this gospel story. But it is in these two characters in the story, one rich, one poor, that we can find the point that Jesus was trying to make.
Jesus was attacking the lifestyles of the Sadducees, who dressed in fine clothing and ate gourmet foods, but who neglected the poor. They didn’t even see the poor, so preoccupied were they with living well and acting correctly.
They could do this because they were part of the temple hierarchy and came from wealthy families. They also had access to temple funds to provide themselves with a few niceties befitting their station. Their modern counterparts are the religious figures who head up mega churches, preach to cult followings, and wear Brioni suits and Rolex watches.
Jesus was also attacking the Pharisees, who Luke describes in verse 14 as lovers of money, who ridiculed Jesus’ teaching about money. Their theology drawn from the book of Deuteronomy persuaded them that wealth is a sign of God’s blessings and poverty is a sign of God’s displeasure. They would consider that a person like Lazarus deserved his suffering
It is a terribly, terribly unfortunate aspect of our own society that wealth is often seen as a reward and poverty is too often seen as a punishment. But it is simply not true that all people get what they deserve--either good or bad--in our society. Many people get misfortune that they do not deserve. Witness the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, who cannot find new jobs because there are none, and the many people who are now facing foreclosure on their homes through no fault of their own.
While this parable might seem to be about money or the lack of it, it is really about values. Its question is not whether we have money, but whether we love money--whether we share God’s concern for the poor and vulnerable--whether we are too preoccupied with personal concerns to notice the Lazaruses in our midst. In a country where the common people were fortunate if they ate a small piece of meat or fish once a week, Dives is a figure of indolent self-indulgence. Today, we don’t need to be wealthy to engage in this kind of self-indulgence, for by world standards, we Americans feast sumptuously every day and all-you-can-eat buffets and super-sized portions have most of us either gaining weight or struggling--like me--to take it off.
Our danger is that we will fail to understand that by world standards, we are rich. I live in a comfortable house with running water, electric lights, flush toilets, a big refrigerator, washing and drying machines, and central heating and air conditioning. I have a closet full of clothes, some of them very nice but hardly ever worn. We have two good cars, a few years old but still very serviceable. I also have some moderately expensive toys to play with. By the standards of most--that is, most--of the world’s people, I am fabulously wealthy. And so are you.
Money is not dangerous or an evil in and of itself--but its uses can be both. The danger is in what people do with money, and in what money can do to us. One commentator observed that it gave Dives “I” trouble. He could not see beyond his “Is”: I want…I need…I desire…I deserve…I like. His sin was not that he was rich, for that is not a sin. His sin was in what he allowed money to do to him. He allowed his self-concern to blind him to the needs of others who were
less fortunate than he.
Dives represents all people who spend their money on themselves, with never a concern for the fact that money--even a little money--imposes duty on us.
It is our duty to consider carefully how we use our money--not only what we have, but what we shall have. Our planning must go beyond planning for the possessions we want to acquire next. God must be our partner in our financial planning.
We have a duty to the Lazaruses in our community and in other lands on the other side of the world. We have a duty to the people, both near to us and far away from us, who live with little comfort or hope and who could use our help. Some of those people might possibly be as near to you as the next pew: people who could use a friend, people who are sick or lonely or depressed, people who could use a helping hand.
St. Teresa of Avila said it: “Though we do not have our Lord with us in bodily presence, we have our neighbor, who, for the ends of love and loving service, is as good as our Lord himself.”
Jesus intended that the hearers of his parable--and today, we the readers of it--should ask ourselves some questions.
Where do find our identities in this parable? The rich man in the story was identified only by his wealth, and that proved to be empty.
In what ways, and to what extent, do we pursue things that ultimately fail to satisfy?
Does our struggle for income and accumulation blind us to the needs of others?
How can we use our financial resources faithfully and justly?
Jesus calls us to examine our lives. Jesus would have concurred with Socrates, the Greek philosopher, who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
There is nothing wrong with working hard and making some money and saving some of it. There is nothing wrong with using some money to buy some comfort and some enjoyment. There is something wrong with never being able to help someone else because we haven’t enough for ourselves.
It is the generosity and unconditional love and grace of God that gives life and identity--not our bank balances, houses, cars or clothes. And it is only the generosity and unconditional love and grace of God that will ultimately satisfy us--not things.
It is as Blaise Pascal said, there is a God-shaped blank space in our hearts. We feel its emptiness and we try to fill it with many pleasures and possessions--but only God will fit in that blank, and only God can fill it.



Sermon preached by Chuck Swann, Faith Presbyterian Church, September 26, 2010

A Golden Parachute (Luke 16:1-13)

You have heard me speak, from time to time, of preaching from the lectionary. Well, what is that? It is a three-year cycle of scripture readings that offers, for each Sunday in the year, lessons from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the gospels and the epistles. I am a New Testament preacher and I choose to preach from the gospel texts, most of the time, though not always. Why abide by the lectionary? For the reason that it is designed to expose us, over a period of three years, to the “whole counsel of God.” I take that seriously, rather than just skipping around in the Bible and choosing texts that strike my fancy or support my prejudices.
But one of the problems lectionary preachers encounter is that sooner or later, the lectionary is going to present us with some texts that are difficult to understand and even harder to explain. Today’s gospel lesson is one of those. On the face of it, Jesus appears to be citing the actions of a dishonest man as an example for believers.
We read this passage and we want to say, “Hey, wait a minute, Jesus! This guy is a crook. How can this be?”
I.
On the face of it, Jesus appears to be citing the actions of a dishonest man as an example for believers. But if we dig beneath the surface, we can see that Jesus may have been describing the action of a dishonest man who chose to become honest in order to save himself.
There are two possible interpretations of the man’s conduct--with lessons to be drawn from both.
First, if we say that the transactions described in the parable were dishonest, as they seem on their face to be, we can hardly believed they were praised by the man’s boss, who was the victim of a fraud. If we say that these actions were dishonest, we can say no more than that the master commended the steward, not for dishonesty, but for realism, determination and resourcefulness in dealing with a personal and business emergency.
In that case, the parable must have been one of Jesus’ warnings about coming crises, a warning from Jesus to his followers, the children of light, that they would have to be as wise as the children of this world, to take immediate and resolute action in the face of impending disaster. And Jesus did warn of hard times ahead for them. And so, under the interpretation of the steward’s actions as being simply dishonest, we can hear in the story a warning from Jesus to his followers that they could not sit on their hands when the times called for resourcefulness and action.
But in a second interpretation of the parable, we can also make a case that the steward was not committing a wrong by his actions, but righting a wrong. These people were Jews, remember; and the law of Moses forbade the taking of interest from fellow Jews on any kind of loan or credit.
(Closer to our own religious history, Martin Luther agreed with the Old Testament prohibition against charging interest for any reason. But John Calvin recognized the difference between personal and production credit. It was not okay with Father John to borrow money to buy a bigger TV set; it was okay to borrow money to buy stuff to make soap that you would sell to your neighbors. This put our Calvinist forebears a step ahead of the Lutherans on making money.)
We simply don’t know how to interpret the dishonest manager’s actions. It may be that Jesus was offering another subtle criticism of the ethics of the Pharisees. In their time the Pharisees had found ways of getting around the law. They argued that the purpose of the law was to protect the poor and destitute from exploitation--not to prevent the lending of money or the extension of credit for the mutual profit of lender and borrower. They argued that there were some situations in which a loan could be considered a kind of business partnership and interest on the loan was just a fair sharing of profits. And if a man already possessed any measure at all of the commodity he wished to borrow--wheat, oil, etc.--he was not destitute and it was okay to charge him interest.
Thus interpreted, this parable is an attack on the niggling, insincere methods of scriptural interpretation by which the Pharisees managed to keep their religious principles from interfering with their business dealings.
They could have rationalized the actions of the steward in the parable. What he did was to return their promissory notes to the debtors and write new ones--without interest. And so, for the first time in his career, perhaps, he had done what the law of Moses required. It is called doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
He was obligating the debtors to him. He was also building up his master’s reputation as a just man. He was ready to make spiritual capital by a munificent gesture--when there was no other course open to him.
The steward was too weak to dig ditches and too proud to beg, so he set up for himself a “golden parachute,” as it is called in the business world these days. He would save these creditors a lot of money, and they would be obliged to help him out when he lot his job.
It is common in the upper echelons of corporate management these days, for officers and directors to be protected from loss if a company is acquired by another in a merger or takeover, or if for any reason they lose their jobs. Their employment contracts protect them from loss and guarantee them handsome stipends if they are fired. In recent memory, Ross Perot caused so much trouble when he became a director of General Motors that the board paid him millions of dollars to leave. And in even more recent memory, many of the officers and directors of some of the nation’s largest bank left their positions with multimillion dollar payments in hand as their companies melted down behind them. Golden parachutes, indeed.
II.
This parable, according to verse one, was told to the disciples, not to the crowd, but in verse 14 we learn that the Pharisees, “who were lovers of money” were listening too. That being the case, perhaps it was Jesus’ principle point in telling the story that if worldly men like the landowner and his steward can recognize that their best interests will be served by keeping the good opinion of their neighbors, religious people ought to be equally astute in keeping the good opinion of both neighbors and God.
On our recent western trip, our bus passed through some country said to have been the territory of the famous Butch Cassidy and his Hole-in-the-Wall gang. And since this was a morning for a long bus ride, to help pass the time, our tour guide showed us the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” on the bus’ video system. Butch Cassidy and his sidekick were out-and-out criminals. They robbed banks and trains. And we are not supposed to root for such bandits. But we did. Everyone who saw that movie mentally and emotionally supported Butch and the Kid because they were, at least in the movie, such appealing characters--just a couple of happy-go-lucky guys who stole money…at gunpoint. And when we analyze our support for them, we realize that we were manipulated by the movie makers into liking these characters.
We cannot--and should not--give the same emotional support to the crook in this parable. But we must admit that as quick-witted and ingenious as he was in acting for his own self-interest, so we as followers of Christ ought to be enthusiastic and energetic in our lives as children of God.
It is always typical of a group following a strong leader that the group members abdicate their own power of decision making and turn it over to the leader. This is why cults invariably have one person at the top of the heap whose rule is unquestioned. Jesus did not want his followers to be like this. He saw an unfortunate tendency toward passivity in his followers. He saw in them an unfortunate interpretation of his description of God as a loving father. Some of his people were descending into an attitude of “big daddy will take care of us.” He saw them fastening on those aspects of the religion he taught as a relief from the religion of fear that was taught by the religious leaders of the day.
That same tendency toward passivity infects some Christians today, and Jesus doesn’t like it today, either. Some Christians today think of weekly worship as the full discharge of their duty, and Jesus doesn’t like that, either. Some Christians today would seem to be singing to themselves unendingly, “Be not dismayed, whate’er betide; God will take care of you.” Jesus doesn’t like that, either.
III.
Jesus calls on his followers to be active in the faith; not passive. We are to be busy serving; not sitting. The Christian life does not consist of soaking up salvation like spiritual sponges. Jesus calls us, as he called his disciples so long ago, to be busy…dreaming…scheming…deciding…doing.
Two men who have been particularly adept at dreaming and scheming in the business world are Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, both of whom are among the richest men in the world. Gates became a multibillionaire through his genius and some sharp business practices in the world of computers. Buffet became a multibillionaire through his genius in the business world and his mastery of buying and selling stocks. It must be seen--and it has been seen by both men-- that the acquisition of wealth often comes at the expense of someone else. I do not know what they think and how they feel about how they acquired their wealth; but I do know that both men have pledged to give at least half their billions to charity. They also have challenged another 80 of the world’s billionaires to do the same, and 40 of them have already agreed to do so.
Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant who became one of this country’s wealthiest men, used his money to build more than 2,500 public libraries. He had this to say about it: “This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: To set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance, to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent on him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds…to administer in the manner…best calculated to produce the most beneficial results to the community.”
One more modern man observed cynically that money is how you keep score. Money can’t buy happiness, jokes one of my friends; a man with five billion dollars is just as happy as a man with 10 billion. But there is happiness to be found in giving it away to someone who needs it--and in the case of many of the world’s people, who need it desperately. Jesus calls us to a life of self-giving. And money is either a tool or a trap. We cannot serve two masters. We must decide for one or the other.
The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer contains these memorable words, “In all time of tribulation; in all time of prosperity…good Lord deliver us.”
Paul said to Timothy (I Timothy 6: 10), the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. That’s the love of money; not money itself. Money is not bad in itself; money is good when it does not rule us, but serves us and others who need our help.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has a great deal to say about the dangers associated with money, for money competes with God for our attention and affection. Wrong attitudes about money can bring about spiritual ruin. But it is entirely possible to use money in Christ-like ways. God give us resources that not only provide for our needs, but also allow us to demonstrate our faithfulness. God will know whether we used our resources to help others.
The real moral of this story is one that finds great emphasis in Luke’s gospel: forgive. Forgive it all. Forgive it now. Forgive it for any reason or for no reason. Forgive because the Lord’s Prayer asks God to “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And the real major character in this story is the master who forgave the steward for mismanaging his funds in the first place. That master, of course, represents the God who forgives us for our misbehavior. The currency, the money, of God’s kingdom is forgiveness.
CONC.
Whatever our circumstances, we can help people who have less than we have. Even poor people can help others. I remember the comment of a missionary to Brazil who responded to those Americans who said they could not afford to tithe their incomes. He said, “I know people who live in houses with dirt floors who do.”
Our calling is to see our personal resources, whatever they may be, as having eternal consequences. Do we see the connection of our money and possessions to the causes of Christ? Jesus does! He calls us to be clever and energetic with our resources, for his sake.
Obedience, heeding the calls of Christ, is our “Golden Parachute.” When the time comes for each of us to bail out, we may know that we shall land gently and safely. Amen.

God's Lament (Jeremiah 8:18-9:3)

The miners from Chile have been much in the news and much on our minds.
The whole world has been in their corner.
And many of us have given a thought or two or more to what it must have been like to have been 2000 feet down in a dark, dirty, hole without much food or water.
How would I have handled that?
How would you have handled that?
Would I have felt God-forsaken?
Would I have shouted out my anger at God and man?

Have you ever felt like life was teetering
On the edge of chaos—held together by a thin thread
Tears, anxiety
Hovering just below the surface
Fear, grief, trepidation

Heart sick
Joy Gone
Utter dismay

Isolated, alone,
Angry, crushed

Have you ever breathed Lament from every pore of your being

GOD HAS

Hear now the powerful lament of God from the prophet Jeremiah 8:18 -9:3

This is the word of God for all people—Thanks be to God

From the mouth of Jeremiah we hear the words of our suffering God.
We hear the disappointment, the agony, the weeping for God’s children who have turned away.

In our hearing, we yearn for a verse of Hope
And in our yearning
We are given permission to express the Gut Wrenching parts of our life.

In God’s Lament, we humans,
We who are indeed created in the Image of God
Are Freed to express all that is within us


Freed to have no barriers, no secrets
Freed to have all things spoken and exposed to God

Mary can say, “Lord, if you have been here, my brother would not have died”
And others could say, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying”

They could bring God in Christ to tears, but they were free to express all that was within their hearts.

God can hear our every thought. Our prayers can open all of our life to God.
We don’t have to act nicely in God’s presence.
We don’t have to appear better off than we are,
to put on joyfulness when our hearts are broken,

When we feel alone and forsaken God will hear us.

If God’s speech is Raw—Ours can be too

Our lament, our doubt, our questions—
Even our Anger bring no danger to our relationship with God
They are ingredients that enhance our relationship with God
Because these are real.




These ingredients bring full-flavor to who we are
As we live in the potter’s hand,
As we live in the hands of the one
Who will make us whole.

The beauty of Lament is that it is real
Reflecting the true realities of life

The freedom of lament
Is that in giving voice to our anguish
We realize that we are not alone in our pain

When we hear the pain of God
We can perhaps find something that reflects life as we know it
Life as we are experiencing it

In our songs of Lament
Those around us enter with us
God enters with us
And through our cries
The possibility of hope is Reborn
When our cries are heard—When someone listens
The journey toward healing begins.

The prophets and the psalmist assure
That the depth and raw-ness of our pain
Can be given directly to God
We have the promise that God is never absent.
God enters our pain-no matter what we may be suffering




And the God who enters our pain
Is the same God
Who saw his only son tortured.
Who watched his only son die.
Who cries for a people who turn from him.
The God who enters our pain –with us
Is the God who knows suffering.

The tears of God that we read about today
Are tears for a wayward people.
And they are tears for us

God sees our suffering—coming just down the road
Our suffering because of our choices
Because we turn away.

God sees where we are headed
And a fountain of tears is not enough to express his sorrow

It must feel a bit like watching children and grandchildren struggle into adulthood

We are vulnerable in our watching.
What happens to them hurts us.
Sometime what happens to them hurts us more
Than anything we could bring on ourselves

When life’s pain stems from terrible decision, we feel helpless.
What happens to another hurts us and we lament.

God watches us struggle—struggle to grow
God sees where we are headed
And a fountain of tears is not enough to express God’s sorrow.

God hurts because God’s children hurt.
God hurts because we hurt.
We hurt ourselves and we hurt each other.


And in Jeremiah’s time God’s hurt is increased
Because not only did the people of God—the children of God
Make terrible decisions
But they are also indifferent about it.
They just do not seem to care

Have you ever wanted to shake someone till their teeth rattle?
As you watch them arrogantly
Choose a path toward destruction?

But we can not make others strong with our strength.
We can not make others wise with our wisdom.
Strength and wisdom have to be discovered and developed, and have to be learned—not given.

Each person having to discover in his own way.
Each having to give birth to his own strength.
Each having to give birth to his own wisdom.
And to endure the labor of that process
Labor that often, -maybe always, involves pain

God is watching the people of Israel
As the people of God teeter on the brink of Chaos
And God cries.

God cries for a community headed toward Death
A nation where communal integrity is Destroyed

God’s people have forgotten
That they are accountable for each other
And responsible to each other
I’m afraid this is true, not just for the people of Israel, but also for us.

We are indeed keepers of our Brothers and Sisters
All our brothers and sisters around the globe
The poor, the homeless, the hungry
The jobless, the unwanted and the unloveable
The forgotten, the lonely, the hurting
The hated and the enemy

God’s people have forgotten that
We are inter-dependent and inter related
What happens to one—happens to us all
There are no independent, isolated actions
Our attempts to get ahead—may push someone else behind.
Our moves toward arrogantly imagined selfish goals may
Put a stone of stumbling in the path of the Kingdom of God.

Not only in Jeremiah’s world, but here and now as we read the news of business and politics, and society,
We can see that God’s people have forgotten that God alone is Lord
Of our lives and of all things.

As a result of all this forgetting
We see ourselves attempting to shape the world
According to our vision—not God’s.

Have the people of God forgotten true life
And in the process chosen death?

We choose death
When we try to organize life into neat packages
That we can control.

We choose death
When we reject our basic inter dependent, inter-related nature.

We choose death
When we fail to fully listen to the faithful voices around us
When we fail to be accountable and responsible to the will of God.

We choose death
In our idolatry as we seek control
As we take truth and bend and shape it to our own purposes.
What do our business dealings say about our faith?
What do our purchases say?
What does our use of our most valuable resource(time) say?
“They have grown strong in the land for falsehood
And not for truth and they do not know me.. says the Lord”

Hear Jeremiah speak to us, to you and to me.

God’s own people have forgotten to know God
And in their forgetting have chosen death.

And God Laments
As we twist and shape the world for our own glory.

God Laments

Maybe we too need to lament.
Maybe we need to lament the loss of communal integrity.
Maybe we need to lament
The despair that we cover with self-sufficient autonomy
Maybe we need to lament
Hopelessness that we cover with stoic independence.

Or maybe we simply need to bring our basic, human need for God
To a conscious and named level.
Maybe we just need to cry out—revealing
Our exhausted spirits
Our broken relationships,
Our damaged families, and communities
Our viewed, witnessed and experienced violence

Maybe we just need to cry.

Dare we name our brokenness.
Dare we refuse to white-wash truth and reality.
Dare we fully embrace life as Christ intends us to live.

Our God cries for us

The beauty of crying out—the beauty of lament
Is that it is real and reflects the true realities of life

The freedom of crying out—the freedom of lament
Is that in giving voice to our anguish
We realize that we are not alone in our pain.

God cries
And in the pain of God
We can find reflections of ourselves.


Thru all cries—thru all lament
The possibility of hope is reborn.
When cries are heard
When someone listens
The journey toward healing begins.

Scripture assures us—our experience assures us
The experiences of the faithful around us assure us
That the depth and raw-ness of our pain
Can be given directly to God.

We don’t have to make it pretty, or nice, or politically correct for God.

We have the promise that God enters our pain—no matter what.
Through-out history the faithful have marched to the throne of God and cried out their pain.

Our only hope is to march ourselves to the throne of God and in loud lament cry out the pain that lives in our souls.

God, in accepting our lament, brings us to be strong, strong in faith,
strong in utterance,
strong in insistence,
strong in risk-taking




Our prayers of lament teach spiritual survival
Here is what to do in the pit of hopelessness:
Cling to God, even when God has seemed to slip away from you.
Yell at the top of your collective lungs.
Hold tightly, mercilessly, and with every ounce of strength to hope in Christ.
Shout and scream at our Lord and Savior..
That’s it
Don’t hold back.
Complain, protest, resist.
Reach into yourself to claim your experience and your capacity to see and name reality.


Jeremiah serves as a model survivor.
Stick to God with absolute loyalty.
Put doubts and rage and betrayal before God’s face.
Lay it out so you can see it yourselves and can see the deep, unending wound and isolation.
It is exactly laments’ bitter complaints and assaults on divine justice that, paradoxically, make them a perfect vehicle of fidelity.
Fasten on to God with all your strength in the midst of catastrophe.
Keep the relationship alive.
Keep communication open.

Think of the miner, months down in the depths, knowing how unfair this was.
Did you hear one of them say, “I held God’s hand”
We must hold on to God no matter what
And God will hold on to us—no matter what

Halleluah, Amen

The Cost of Discipleship (Luke 14:25-33)

In 1937, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor, published a book entitled The Cost of Discipleship. It became a Christian classic and it was required reading when I was a seminarian. In his book, he attacked the modern Christian tendency toward what he called “cheap grace.” He was not the first to use the term, but he used it more effectively than anyone before him.
What is “cheap grace?” In Bonhoeffer’s words, “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. It is grace without discipleship, without the cross, without Jesus Christ. Or to put it more clearly, it is to hear the gospel preached as follows: ‘Of course you have sinned, but everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are.’”
Bonhoeffer openly and powerfully condemned the acculturated Christianity of Hitler’s Germany, which was busy compromising with and conforming to Naziism. And what happened to him as a result of his preaching and his undercover participation in plotting against Hitler was his own cost of discipleship.
In 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazi Gestapo. He spent the next two years in prison with the Gestapo trying to break him and induce him to become a more conciliatory voice. He refuse to recant. Instead, he defied them and openly admitted that he was an implacable enemy of Hitler and of Naziism and he would never change his mind about either. And so, in April 1945, with American forces closing in on the concentration camp where he was being held, the Nazis hanged Dietrich Bonhoeffer. One report said he was hanged with a thin wire in a manner that would cause him to strangle. Another said he was hanged from a tree in the camp. The cost of his discipleship was ignominious death at the hands of evil men.
If you will look on page 78 in your pew Bibles, you will see that the passage I have read to you is set off as a separate paragraph (pericope) with the title The Cost of Discipleship. I could think of no better title for this sermon.
I.
What does it mean to speak of the “cost of discipleship?” There are two words here: cost and discipleship. Jesus is saying, “You can not be my disciple free; it is going to cost you something.” And he proceeds to shock the crowd by telling them how much it is going to cost them.
As Luke the gospel writer tells the story, Jesus was being followed by a large crowd of people on this, his final, fateful journey to Jerusalem…Jerusalem, where he would pay his own cost of discipleship.
There were two types of people in the crowd. On the one hand, there were those in the multitude, wanting to be on hand for the grand opening of the kingdom Jesus had been preaching about. They were thinking of it, unfortunately, as a renewal of the earthly kingdom of David. They probably thought it was going to be a day of glory, rewards and rejoicing for all. There would probably be dancing in the streets, singing, feasting--a great, grand national party.
In the second group were the disciples and a few others who perceived, however dimly, that Jesus was about more serious business--a lot more serious-- than dancing in the streets. But even some of them, too, thought that perhaps this was going to be the long-awaited day when God, through Jesus, was to unveil finally the promised kingdom that would result in the great religious revival of the Jewish people.
Jesus had tried before to bring both groups down to earth. And here, in today’s reading, we find him stopping to speak one more time, to make one more effort to get the people who were following him to understand that stark realities awaited everyone who would follow him in the dark days that he knew lay ahead.
And so Jesus asked them, “Have you counted the cost of discipleship? Are you willing to pay it?” It is a question we, too, must answer.
What is the cost for us? Is it to make ourselves get up every Sunday morning and get dressed for church when we would rather stay home in our pajamas and read the Sunday paper? Is it to be nice to some of our fellow church members and act as if we are a lot more interested in them than we really are? Is it to put a little something in the collection plate on a regular basis, even if it sometimes makes us quietly say “ouch?”
Jesus said that the cost of discipleship is a lot stiffer than any of that. His words to the crowd were shocking. “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”
“Hate” is a shocking word, and as it is used here simply does not mean what we usually mean by it. In fact, our understanding of the word applied to its use in this passage does not make sense. The Greek word as used here is a term of comparison. It is a way of expressing willingness to be detached from or to turn away from something or someone, even from family members, who may want us to go in a different direction.
Will Willimon, who was chaplain at Duke University for years, once told a group of pastors that he had never had a call from parents saying, “Help us, please. Our son is misbehaving.” But hardly a year went by, he said, when he did not get a call from parents saying something like, “Chaplain, can you help us? Our son (or daughter) has gone overboard with some religious group and wants to go off to Haiti and work in some literacy training program after graduation. And we want him (or her) to go to law school.”
Is such a student, in effect, “hating father and mother” in order to heed the call of Christian discipleship? Yes--in the sense that the student is willing to face the terrible tension between discipleship and the ambitions his or her parents have for their child. It is not a negative matter of not liking or loving one’s parents; rather it is a matter of choosing a higher loyalty.
Jesus is a kind man, and he said to the people, “I know you mean well.” “But,” he continued, “you must understand that if you really mean to be one of my disciples, you are going to have to pay some rent on the job.” The currency in which that rent must be paid will be work and sacrifice. The rewards from doing that job will be in hearing your Savior say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
II.
Jesus said to the people then and says to us now, a discipleship that costs you nothing is not really a discipleship; it is only a pretense. Good intentions are not enough; they must be proven with good deeds. Right beliefs must always be borne out by right conduct.
What does it mean to us, then, to be disciples? And how much will it cost us?
The true disciples of Jesus are those who live out the great commandment of Jesus, which is to love God and to love people--utterly. This means right decisions that result in right actions, commitment that is proven in service and consecration that is observable in one‘s life--or it means nothing at all.
By decision, I mean to really mean what we are saying when we sing “Here I am, Lord. I have heard you calling in the night. I will go, Lord, if you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart.”
Commitment is to truly mean what we are saying when we sing, “I love thy kingdom, Lord.”
Consecration means that we mean what we are saying when we sing, “Take my life and let be consecrated, Lord, to thee.”
Jesus taught us that to love God is know God as our Creator, and to love God as our heavenly Father. And to understand God as Creator and Father is to be sensitive to God’s active presence in the world.
It is to be driven to our knees, as I am, when we consider the heavens, the work of God’s hands. When I seek and find through my telescope some tiny smudge of light that I know to be another galaxy with a hundred billion suns in it, I am in awe of God’s handiwork. But I am no less awed when I lift my eye from the eye piece to throw back my head and behold the canopy of the starlit sky God has spread above us. It is then that I ask in wonder, “Who are we, that you are mindful of us?” The answer that comes to me is, “You are my children and I love you.”
To love God our Father in return means to find the strength and purpose in our lives to worship him intently, to pray to him believingly, and to follow where the Holy Spirit leads us through the words of scripture and the promptings of our brothers and sisters in the church.
To love people means to acknowledge them as our fellow children of God, made in God’s image just as we are. It is to look at other people with trust and understanding--and if they fail and fall, with compassion and forgiveness.
To love people as Jesus loves them is not to engage in some kind of syrupy sentimentality. It is to refuse to be walled off from any of God’s children by hatred, prejudice, fear or class distinction, and to try by every means at our disposal to build creative relationships with them. It is to enter into the arena of public action and commitment on behalf of causes we believe in, and on behalf of persons who need help. It is to take on other people’s problems as our problems, to share as much as we are able in finding solutions to those problems.
I have told this story before, but I am going to tell it again. It is the story of a lady who served as a Vista Volunteer, in the Domestic Peace Corps, and worked at helping poor, elderly and mostly uneducated people in a large and populous county navigate through the bureaucratic mazes that sometimes separated the people from the help they needed. County officials announced one day changes in procedures that this lady felt would work to the detriment of her poor and elderly clients. And so she went from office to office in the county office building to protest the proposed changes. The changes were canceled, and one county official gave as the reason, “Because Mrs. Swann raised so much hell.”
Well, let me not close on that note. She’ll be angry enough as it is, on the way home. Let me close instead with a note about David Livingstone, one of the most famous Christian missionaries and able Christian leaders of all time. He said that his motto had been “Fear God and work hard.” And he said of his career, “That is all I have ever done.” Let us all fear God and work hard--and we will find that the cost of discipleship is well within our ability to pay it. Amen.

Glad Places and Bad Places (Hebrews 12:18-29)

If you spend a lot of time on the Internet, whether for purposes of research, as I do, or for purposes of entertainment, as I do not, you are bound to be exposed to a lot of strange stuff. I simply ignore the great majority of it, but now and then something does grab my attention. Recently, one of those things was a list of 10 places you definitely do not want to visit. Since this seemed to be absolutely counter to the endless blandishments on the Internet of places that advertisers think you will want to visit, I decided to investigate it.
At the top of the list was the volcanic island of Oshima, off the coast of mainland Japan. Oshima, surprisingly enough, has a web site, complete with a cheery message from the mayor of the island’s town. What the mayor’s message does not mention is the constant and pervasive stench throughout the island of sulfur dioxide gas coming from the island’s volcano. Sulfur dioxide is the stuff that smells like rotten eggs. Levels of the gas rose so dangerously high in the year 2000 that the entire island had to be evacuated for five years. The people returned in 2005, but both residents and visitors are now required to carry gas masks at all times, in case the gas levels rise again unexpectedly.
You can go there if you want to; I don’t. This, in effect, is what the writer of the letter to the Hebrews said to Jewish Christians in the New Testament letter before us. The choice is yours: you can retreat into the religious enslavement of darkness and fear that your ancestors experienced at Mt. Sinai, or you can live bravely without fear in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In the sense of a bad place versus a glad place, the writer contrasts two different religious states of mind, two different spiritual cities. In the sense of taking a spiritual journey, rather than a vacation visit, our lesson presents one frightening and forbidding destination, and on the other hand, a city filled with happy celebration.
I.
It is not the main point of the novel, but in A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens does vividly contrast the order of London with the disorder of
Paris during the French revolution. In Paris, the intelligentsia lived in danger of losing their heads on the guillotine. In London, the same persons could live in peaceful stability.
The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, in effect, postulates a tale of two cities and says to Jewish Christians that they must choose to live in one or the other. We may think of the first possibility presented to us as the city of fear. We can, if we choose, go on our spiritual journey to life’s end in fear and dread.
This letter is not easy for us to understand because we have never been Jews, and this letter was written to people whose lifelong religious heritage had been Judaism. It was very hard for many of them to embrace the newfound freedom offered by their Christian churches. One of my best friends in the service, and for years afterward was a good ol’ boy named Luke. We used to say of him that the Marine Corps took Luke out of the country, but it couldn’t take the country out of Luke. So it was with these Jewish Christians. Being converted to belief and faith in Jesus Christ did not mean that they had cast off all the ties of their Jewishness.
To them, Jerusalem, which means “city of peace,” was the religious capital of the world. It may be the most inappropriately named city in the world. Except for brief periods, it has never known peace socially, politically, or religiously. Jerusalem for hundreds of years was the seat of a fear-ridden religion.
The “Hebrews,” the Jewish Christians to whom this letter was addressed, would have been quite familiar with the story of Moses and the people at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Recall from our Old Testament readings that the people were so frightened of God that they implored Moses not to make them listen to the voice of God directly or they would die. Even Moses himself trembled with fear at having to come so close to this terrible God. In their later history, continuous sacrifice at the great temple in Jerusalem was an ongoing attempt to placate this God of whom they were so terrified.
Even in the temple of Jerusalem in the time of Jesus, the presence of God was experienced only by the high priest and only in that small inner sanctum sanctorum area of the temple known as the holy of holies, and then only once a year at Yom Kippur. When the high priest entered the holy of holies, he did so with a rope tied around his ankle. If the bells on his robe fell silent, meaning that he had died or fainted, the other priests could use the rope to drag his body out.
First-century Jews, by and large, experienced God as the God of Mt. Sinai. But this letter says to the Jews, “Come away from Mt. Sinai in the desert; come to Mt. Zion.” Zion, to the Jews, meant the larger concept of the promised land.
II.
Before Jesus, no Jew had ever thought of calling God, “Our Father.” This was an utterly stunning, dumbfounding thought--a shockingly personal idea of God that was so strange as to be incomprehensible. God was a god of sheer, unapproachable majesty to them. Their God was so far exalted above mere humanity that they dared not even speak God’s name, Yahweh, as it was written in the scriptures Instead, they used the euphemism “my Lord” when reading aloud in their synagogues. They feared rather than loved this God.
It is quite possible for Christians today, just as it was for the Jewish Christians to whom this letter was addressed, to continue worshipping this awesome and terrible god of fear. And many do. Some believers and some churches are much more at home in the Old Testament than in the New. Their god is a god who hates sinners as well as sin, a god of vengeance and retribution bent on punishment rather than guidance and fastened on laws rather than love. They would consider the notion that God ever smiles as a blasphemous thought, because God is too great, too fearsome, too awesome ever to smile--especially at human beings who make mistakes. They are the enthusiastic members of the churches that post such signs as, “Where will you spend eternity? Smoking or nonsmoking?”
Religiously, they dwell in the city of fear. I don’t like it. It is an unhappy place, a bad place. I don’t want to live there. I don’t even want to visit there out of curiosity. And I don’t think you could drag Jesus there with a team of horses. Jesus had a different idea, and he wants us to have one with him.
III.
The Letter to the Hebrews suggests an alternative to dwelling religiously in a state of fear. What Jesus has in mind for our spiritual dwelling place is what we may call the city of love. It’s where Jesus lives. And it is where I choose to live.
Jesus came preaching a new idea: the Kingdom of God. The principle tenets of this kingdom are the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and Jesus’ commandment of love. We are all the children of God and God’s love for us is the accepting, forgiving love of a parent. Since we are all children of God, it follows that all men and women are our brothers and sisters. The proper relationship of parents and children and brothers and sisters is mutual love, respect and assistance.
We are all citizens of the city of love and Jesus is the Lord Mayor, sharing in the fatherhood of God with us. It is where we may dwell in this very moment, if we only say “Yes” to it. It is a happy place, a glad place. Every day is a celebration day in the city of love.
It is a happy place not least because Jesus dwells with us in this city of love. It was Jesus who made possible the new understanding of God that replaces the old images of the terrible, punishing God. It is Jesus who reminds us to call God our Father, and to turn from being people filled with fear and to be happy, thankful people. Jesus takes away from the world the terrible, shuddering fear of the religion of Mt. Sinai. Jesus calls us to come out of the city of fear, to come and live with him in the city of love. It is a good place to live. Amen.



Sermon preached by Chuck Swann, Faith Presbyterian Church, August 22, 2010

The Assurance of What We Hope For (Hebrews 11:1-3, 6)

I have never known anyone who departed from the faith in an hour of trial. There are, of course, people who have been so troubled or angered by what they interpreted as the silence or absence of God that they gave up on the Christian faith. But I have only heard or read about them; I have never known such folks. But there are many others who have given up, not on the faith, but on the church.
In a recent newspaper column, Leonard Pitts quoted the famous author Anne Rice, who said, “Today I quit being a Christian. I remain committed to Christ as always, but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome , hostile, disputatious and deservedly infamous group.” Rice once called herself an atheist, but returned a decade ago to the Roman Catholic church of her youth. She continued, “ For 10 years I have tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.” Ms. Rice, whose books about vampires have sold over 100 million copies worldwide, posted her manifesto on the Facebook site on the Internet, where more than 101,000 people have responded positively to her declaration. She also was interviewed on the ABC Evening News program last Wednesday evening.
Rice says she has not lost her faith, but she has simply “had it up to here” with organized religion. “In the name of Christ,” she wrote, “I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science.” Pitts observed in his column that Rice is hardly the only one who feels as she does.
He notes a 2008 study by Trinity College that shows that religiosity is trending down sharply in this country. The American Religious Identification Survey found that the percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians has fallen by 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86% to 76%, while the percentage of those who claim no religious affiliation has almost doubled, from 8% to 15%.
Closer to home, Presbyterians lament the steady loss of membership in our denomination and cry aloud that we must be doing something wrong--if not everything. Those who cry the loudest usually ignore the fact that membership decline is afflicting every--every--mainline denomination in America. They do not recognize the fact that religion in America has always experienced cyclicality, right from the arrival of the Mayflower. And they don’t want even to talk about a peculiar Presbyterian problem, and that is that we don’t produce enough babies to replace ourselves numerically when we die.
Still closer to home, there are those Presbyterians who simply drift away from their churches. Where do they go? They don’t go anywhere. Careful research has established that the great majority of people who quietly leave Presbyterian churches do not go to other denominations. There are exceptions, of course, but generally we lose people to nothingness, not to other denominations. They just stop going to church. Surveys for years have found that more than five million people in the USA identify themselves as Presbyterians. Church rolls add up to only half that many members. What happened to the other half who call themselves Presbyterians?
Most of the departed whom I have known simply wandered away from faithful participation in the church. They slipped way gradually, without ever consciously deciding to do so. But just as unused body muscles will gradually become smaller and weaker, so it is with spiritual muscles. A faith that is not regularly exercised will become atrophied, like the biceps on an old preacher man. We live in Lake Arrowhead, where I notice that the great majority of the plentiful automobiles are never moved on Sunday morning. When faith becomes atrophied, it becomes easy to stay home on Sunday morning.
A condition of spiritual atrophy prompted the writing of the Letter to the Hebrews. The danger that aroused the writer of this letter was not such definite and grave heresies as imperiled the churches at Galatia and Colossae, nor such vices as imperiled the church at Corinth. Rather it was a gradual, unconscious, growth of doubt and weakening of faith that dulled hopes and slackened energies. This was happening everywhere among the young churches, since the second coming of Christ had obviously been delayed, and the Letter to the Hebrews was not written to one particular congregation, but to all Jewish Christians everywhere in the world of the pre-adolescent church.
Many of the people in the young churches had been in them long enough to grow out of the first flush of enthusiasm. They had begun lapsing into the mental and spiritual condition of many people in every age of the Christian church, including our own: a condition of languor and weariness, of disappointed expectations, deferred hopes, and conscious failure. They had begun to experience a practical unbelief that relegated the active practice of Christianity to the background of their lives and put many other things ahead of it.
I.
All pastors brood about those members of the flock who just don’t seem to care. They wish they could restore in those members the boldness of hope and the intensity of faith that should characterize their calling as Christians. Pastors long to have all their people see that there is another dimension to life that is more than working hard to achieve material goals and taking recreation breaks on weekends. They long to help them see that a life lived with little or no consciousness of the spiritual dimension is only half a life. They want to see people draw nearer to God and stop giving to the appearance and shadow of a materialistic culture the value that really belongs only to the great reality of God in Christ.
And so we pastors exhort our flocks to have done with lesser things and draw nearer to God, believing that God exists and that he rewards those who seek him, as we read in one our text verses.
It sounds like a simple thing. For who among us does not believe that God exists? But that is not the rub, Christians. The problem for all of us--all of us--is to believe that God is what the Bible says God is: one who loves us and wants very much to be included in our lives. The problem is to believe not only that God was explained to us in Jesus of Nazareth, but to believe wholeheartedly and enthusiastically that this can make a difference in our lives.
I believe a lot of things. I believe, with my brain, that when I flip the switch the light will come on. But whether it does or does not has no real, lasting effect on my life. The problem of faith is not merely to believe with our heads, but to believe with our hearts, to the point where our lives are changed by this belief.
I have encountered several responses to the challenge to believe in this heartfelt manner. The first and most often heard response is simply, “Of course, I believe.” But this quick answer is often followed by one of several additional responses.
One says, “Of course, I believe,” but that may be followed with a quick, usually unspoken, “Now leave me alone.”
Another says, “Of course, I believe, but…. The “buts” are several. “But what has that got to do with my life?” Or my career, or my business, or the problems I am experiencing?
Another says, “Of course, I believe. And I’m certainly going to do something about it, very soon.”
But teaching and preaching the faith is not always disappointing. We still encounter some people who respond, “Yes, I believe--and thanks for reminding me.” These are the ones who minister to the minister by making him feel that perhaps his task is not such a thankless one after all.
And there is still another response that touches the heart in a different way. This is the response of the one who says, “I believe; help my unbelief!” Recall the story, in the ninth chapter of Mark’s Gospel, of the father who brought his epileptic son to Jesus and said, “Help me if you can!” In one breath, he confessed both his belief and his doubts. His honest confession of doubt was perfectly acceptable to Jesus and he did help the man. The lesson in this story is for all of us who may be inclined to think that faith must be in perfect, apple-pie order to get the attention and sympathy of God. It does not.
I would be remiss if I did not speak of the plaintive voice of those who cry out, “I believe, Lord! Why won’t you help me out of this trouble?” To this question, I can only quote the answer in the letter to the Hebrews: in this, too, God’s love will be revealed. In this, too, God’s love will be revealed.
II.
There was a time in my life when some of my very real questions and wonderment seemed always to be answered by the admonition to “have faith.” I thought it was a little silly on the part of some people who ought to have known better to tell me to do the very thing I was asking how to do. But it wasn’t silly; they were just doing the best they could to help a perplexed young man. Although neither they nor I understood it at the time, the biblical admonition to “have faith” means quite simply, “Accept the gifts of God.” John Calvin, bless his stern old heart, said that faith is “…a steady and certain knowledge of (God’s love for us). Faith is a steady and certain knowledge of God’s love for us!
Faith is not an act of the will in which you decide to believe and act in a certain way. Faith is something God gives to those who simply admit to God that they don’t have enough. (REPEAT)
To the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, faith is a hope that is certain that what it believes is true and that what it expects will come. It is not the hope that looks forward with wistful longing. It is not the hope that is pinned on a perhaps. It is the hope that is founded on a solid conviction.
Your beloved old KJV says that faith is the substance of things hoped for. The RSV uses the word assurance, rather than substance. Both of these words are attempts at the translation of a Greek word, “hypostasis,” that had a technical meaning in the business world of the first century. It was used to refer to documents that were evidence of ownership.
About 2,000 years ago, a woman named Dionysia lost in a local court a dispute about the ownership of a piece of land. She appealed the case to a higher court in Alexandria and sent her slave to that city with all the pertinent documents in a strong box. On the way, the slave was killed in a fire that destroyed the inn in which he had stopped for the night. For about 2,000 years, the sands of the desert covered the ruins of the inn, the charred bones of the slave and the strongbox. In our time, archaeologists uncovered the ruins and the remains. In the box, they found the legal documents. The letter to the judge in Alexandria said, “In order that my lord, the judge, may know that my appeal is just, I attach my hypostasis. It was the title deed to the piece of land, the evidence of her ownership.
This throws a bright light on this teaching regarding faith. Faith is the title deed of things hoped for. It is the substantial reality by which we Christians live. The act of exercising faith--as one prays or as one leans on the resources of God--is itself the title deed or evidence that we already posses the things we hope for.
When I bought my car and drove it away from the dealership seven years ago, I believed and felt that it was my car. In actuality, the legal title to it was held by the bank to which I made payments. When I made the final payment, the bank gave me the title document. Just so, some things we may hope for may be still in God’s hands, awaiting the proper time of delivery, but they are ours. We may be absolutely certain that God will honor this title deed--this guarantee of his love for us.
III.
This faith does not just pop up full-grown in our lives one day. It is something we grow into. Certainty may elude us--all of us--at times. Paul and John Calvin and whoever wrote the Letter to the Hebrews do not seem to have had any uncertainty. Rather, I think it more likely that in their role as teachers, they just never put any uncertainties down on paper. They and a million preachers who have followed them have felt that they had to write and preach and teach with authority and assurance and they could never, ever express anything less than total certainty.
But I am not like them. I will not tell you that I have gone through my spiritual pilgrimage or my ministry completely untroubled by any doubt or uncertainty. I don’t think anybody does--or can. (There are in the religious world some deluded people and some people who lie to themselves, of course.)
Our spiritual lives are, I think, like the pendulum in my grandmother’s clock that sits on the mantle over our fireplace. The pendulum swings from one extreme of its arc to the other. But it is always trying to come to rest at the center of its arc. My spiritual arc has a center, a still point that is God, the ground of my being. But I am not still. My life swings back and forth from perplexity to peace, from joy to sadness, from boredom to excitement, from belief to unbelief. And there are days when I must pray, “O God…if there is a God.”
And so will you, if you are honest. And I am here to tell you that the God I proclaim finds this honest admission completely acceptable. The ultimate gift of God is that God is just as sympathetic to our doubts and our confusion as to our faith, so great is God‘s love for us. (REPEAT)
God’s great gift to us is to accept us and love us as we are, not as we hope to be someday. To grow in faith is to grow in this understanding of God. Amen.




Sermon preached by Chuck Swann, Faith Presbyterian Church, August 15, 2020

Some Basics of the Christian Life, Colossians 3: 1-17 by Rev. Charles Swann

I was taught English grammar in elementary school by a severe lady named Otley Pippin who took no guff from any student. After I grew past the elementary stage, I realized that I was indebted to her for drumming the rules of English grammar into my head, for she laid much of the foundation of my education that later enabled me to become a minister and writer and editor. But while I was in elementary school, I joined all the other kids in reciting, “I’d rather have a whippin’ than a class from Otley Pippin.”]

Miss Pippin taught me that there were three kinds of English sentences.

Imperative: “Charles, wash your hands.”

Declarative: “I did wash my hands.”

Interrogative: “Did you use soap?”

What does this have to do with the Christian religion? I hope to explain that these three categories have a lot to do with how people understand and/or misunderstand what the Christian religion is all about. I have encountered in my time a great many people who have, at best, only a hazy understanding of the Christian religion. And not all of them were outside the church! It is all right for people to be quietly religious and not get too deeply into theology. But all too often, a lack of understanding leads to misunderstanding.

It leads people to define religion in terms of imperatives--orders or commands: thou shalt; thou shalt not. Do this or don’t do that, although it seems impossible for you to obey the imperatives, the commands you think you hear from religion and you certainly don’t know anybody who gets it right. And be a certain way, you think you hear from religion, although it is altogether unlike the way you are and you don’t know anybody who gets it right.

A religious understanding--or misunderstanding--that is couched only in terms of imperatives, commands, inevitably leads to frustration and a sense of personal futility…because you can never pull it off…you can never get it right. So what happens? Many, many times it causes people simply to leave religion alone, to stay away from it.

A better understanding recognizes that, yes, there are imperatives in the Gospel. But they rest on declaratives, on statements about what has been done for us. The Bible is not just a collection of imperatives, things for us to do. It is first and foremost a presentation of declaratives, things God has done.

I.

To understand all that Paul had to say to the Colossians, and all that this passage has to say to us today, requires examining and understanding the declaratives as well as the imperatives in this letter. For it is what God has done for us that makes it possible for us to live the life that is envisioned in the imperatives--the kind of life that the Apostle Paul calls the risen and redeemed life.

Why is it called that? Because it is a life of participation. The word participation implies doing something along with other people, or entering into an experience that someone else has prepared for you. In our case, it means that we participate in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is basic Christian belief.

In our profession of faith and baptism, we participate vicariously in the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the inextinguishable life of Christ. The symbolism in baptism is that we die with him, we are buried with him, we are raised and made alive with him. On and over my mortal life and my lack of merit has been superimposed the life and merit of Christ. This understanding was so real to Paul that he could say, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” This was much more vivid in the minds of the ancients to whom Paul wrote this letter than it is in our minds, unfortunately.

Now, we can insist that we are just as bad and useless and disappointing as we ever were, but God does not think so, because he sees us joined to Jesus and participating in his life.

The wonderful results of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are passed on to us at our profession of faith, our baptism and when we celebrate Holy Communion. In these sacraments, God reminds us the reminder that we are his people. We belong to him; we are members of his family.

The Christian faith demands awareness of my life not as my own invention, but a gift of God. And as an historical faith rooted in a specific place and a specific people, this faith means that I am to embrace my own particular life, the place where God has set me down and the people God has placed me among, also as gifts of God. God has put his chosen, forgiven people together in the one holy Christian Church made up of congregations like this one.

If we participate in the life of Christ, we do so together. The church is the physical manifestation of the body of Christ. As part of the body of Christ, we are part of each other. As members of the body of Christ we participate in a common life of sharing and mutual help. No Christian can be a tight little island. I have reminded you before of the Simon and Garfunkel song that says, “I am a rock. I am an island.” This is not and cannot be true of a believing Christian. We are not and cannot be apart from each other. The people to the right of you and to the left of you are your brothers and sisters, your siblings in the household of God. We have true fellowship with one another because we have all been united with Christ.

II.

When we understand the declaratives of the Gospel, we can deal with the imperatives. Because through our baptism we have participated in the death and the risen life of Jesus Christ, with all that involves, Paul can charge us to put to death that which is earthly in us. He gives us a list.

At the top of the list, are moral failures related to sex, that most basic of human urges that is second in our drives only to meeting our survival needs. Nothing pervades our whole nature--physical, mental and emotional--more than sex. There is no man in this room who has not taken a second look at a pretty young lady. And there is no woman in this room who has not taken a second look at a handsome man with beautiful blue eyes. This is because God created us as sexual beings. God intends for us to use and enjoy this powerful drive--chastely and rightly and properly, keeping our sexuality controlled and directed only in the proper channels.

But it is hard to keep sexuality in its proper place when our whole culture is shot through, saturated, with sexual license--when our culture constantly throws at us all the things Paul lists: fornication, impurity, lust, evil desire. The opposite of chastity and purity is thrown at us in every newspaper, magazine, TV show and movie. But the constant awareness that we are participants in the life of Christ and of each other can enable us to put these sins off from us.

Next on Paul’s list is greed, the inordinate desire for money, for things, things and more things. But be reminded that just as there are right and proper sexual urges, so there are rightful desires and uses for things for things. W3e need a certain amount of material--as I call it--”stuff.” Even monkish old John Calvin could say, in writing about the right use of this world’s goods, that clothing, for example, is not merely to cover us and keep us warm, but also to give us a pleasing appearance that delights the eye. Looking good makes you feel good!

But in our time, we have gone far beyond necessity, convenience and even beauty. Our world runs on the desire for more, more, more. Dr. Al Winn, a past president of Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, observed that the worst danger of television is not the soft porn that besmirches so many programs; it is the hard sell of the commercials between program segments. What we are being told dozens of times a day is the by buying and owning things, we can receive the peace, joy and blessedness that, truly, only God can give. The hunger for things is pure idolatry.

Dr. Gilbert Bowen has observed that our secularist consumerist society is almost inevitably a society that breeds envy of what others have, which is by definition restlessness and discontent with who we are and what we possess. It rarely occurs to the folks who fill up the parking lots of the malls that happiness may consist more in what we do without, the willingness to be content with less than having what everybody else seems to think important or necessary. If we are truly to live happily and fulfilled, rather than always empty and hungry for more “stuff,” it will be as we learn to treasure the life given to us now, this day, rather than continually longing to be someone else or to live out some other story.

Next, Paul moves on to another list of things we must put away from ourselves. I call them sins of the tongue. They include anger: the unrestrained outburst of temper. Wrath: the slow-burning grudge. Malice: a frame of mind that wishes bad things, not good ones, for another person or group of people. Slander: the urge to belittle or defame others, to build one’s self up by cutting someone else down. Abusive language that says to or about other people things we would not want said to or about ourselves. And Paul caps the list of the sins of the tongue with “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self and clothed yourself with the new self.”

III.

That last is an important point. When we put off the old self, we must take the positive step of putting on the new. I have a lot of old clothes. In fact, some of my clothes may be older than some of you. I wear them around the house and Janell lives in the constant fear that I will wear some of them outside the house, that I will go somewhere in them. Well, as casual as I am about clothes, I do recognize the need now and then to put on something that was actually acquired in this decade. But there is no now-and-then in clothing ourselves with the new self. We have to remember to wear the new self every day. Clothing ourselves in the new self every day, to borrow some of Father Calvin’s words, gives us a pleasing appearance that delights the eyes, both of God and our neighbors and ourselves. Looking good makes you feel good! And we never look better than when we wear the new nature that Christ provides us.

Reminding us of our new natures, Paul then shifts from things we are to turn away from to list some things for us to turn to. (I know, I am ending a sentence with a preposition.) Things to turn to. So there.

Compassion: not pity, not merely feeling sorry for others from a position of comfort and safety, but stepping down from the position of comfort and safety and entering into the sufferings of others.

Kindness and gentleness: Did you ever stop to think that kindness and gentleness are only good manners?

Humility: not thinking of ourselves more highly than we should.

Meekness: being honest with myself about myself, in the light of God’s mercy.

Patience: having a long temper instead of a short one. And patiently saying I am sorry when I have been short-tempered.

Paul says that we should use these virtues in order to be able to put up with each other…in order to forgive one another. And he goes on to speak more about love and peace and thankfulness, the very hallmarks of the church.

And finally he says, “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”


This is a beautiful picture: to be able to live and work and play, to earn our daily bread, to keep our house, to grow our tomatoes, to cook a meal, to hammer a nail, to play a game of bridge or a round of golf, or even to mow the lawn--to do all these things giving thanks to God. Though we may not be able to achieve perfectly this ideal way of being, it nevertheless is a noble goal to keep in sight, because we live risen lives…risen with Jesus Christ.

How to Accept Your Acceptance, Colossians 1: 21-29 by Rev. Charles Swann

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there came a time when my family and I, for reasons of my employment before I went to seminary, had to move to and live in Columbus, Georgia. In those days, Columbus was a rather drab and unattractive mill town. It has changed greatly in the last few decades, but in those days it was one of the dullest places I have ever known.

And yet, we were happy there. We made ourselves at home there, in spite of the town’s surface unattractiveness. I used to tell people that Columbus was a nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit there. We found much to be glad about in Columbus. We made many friends there. We were especially happy in our membership and participation in the Edgewood Presbyterian Church of Columbus, the church that was my springboard into ministerial studies.

We made ourselves at home in Columbus because we were reconciled to our location and circumstances, and we seized on what was good about them. Being reconciled and finding much to be glad about is at the heart of this lesson from the letter to the Colossians.

I.

The very first step in our pilgrimage toward spiritual contentment is to come to grips with the difficulty of being reconciled with our reconciliation with the God of our religion--facing and admitting how hard it is for us to accept our acceptance by God.

It is hard to believe that God loves us. It is easy to sing hymns about it; but it is hard to feel it. We say with our lips that God loves us warmheartedly; but we cannot honestly say that we actually feel that love warming our hearts.

I think this is so partly because we don’t love ourselves warmheartedly. We look at ourselves and we don’t like what we see. How can anyone, including God, love us? We don’t see or experience ourselves as being very lovable.

Also, it is hard to see God’s love in the pain we feel…in the sorrow we experience…in the disappointments that assail us…in the state of the world about us.

And, it is hard to accept our acceptance because we can’t escape the feeling that something more radical should have happened in our lives. We go through the motions of being church people. We do and say what the church bulletin says we should say and do next, but we don’t feel closer to God by having done it.

I think a part of our problem may stem from childhood religious and cultural conditioning--and especially from childhood here in the Southland--that values “conversion” experiences. I am sure you have heard the one about the fellow who was such a staunch old-time Presbyterian conservative that he wouldn’t eat any kind of rice except Uncle Ben’s converted rice. I remember how totally nonplussed I was by an experience I had as a student supply pastor, before I had completed seminary and been ordained. One of the members of the church came to me one day and announced that his son--call him Johnny--had been “converted” the night before and wanted to join the church. Johnny was seven years old. I didn’t have any idea what a seven-year-old could have been converted from, but we went to the session, where the elders gently convinced the father that we should wait just a few more years before Johnny made his profession of faith.

The keyword in this incident was “converted.” In this case, it spoke of Johnny’s father having been brought up in a Southern American religious culture that valued radical separation from the world and from worldliness. To make a profession of faith in Christ was to be “converted.”

I cannot claim, nor do I wish to claim, a conversion experience. And for those of you who are like me in that respect, if we really examine ourselves, we may find that the question nags us: Is it really enough to have never known not being part of the church? Is it really enough to have never known a time or state when we did not consider ourselves to be Christians? I was born and raised in a very conservative social and religious environment, one in which Christians were supposed to be “born again” and I cannot pretend that it left no marks on me. I did not have a so-called conversion experience and I remember how comforted I felt by reading William James’ exposition of the once-born and the twice-born in his book Varieties of Religious Experience. I am once-born, and it is okay. It is okay for you, too.

Another reason why it is so hard for us to feel--actually feel--the love of God is because we are forever running away from that love. We are like our own children, impatiently wanting to leave home, to strike out on our own, to be independent.

As children, we don’t want to be stifled and controlled by the love of our parents. We want to be totally independent. We parents really don’t want to be loved by God as much as we love our children, because we fear that it would demand changes and commitments that we don’t want to make.

We prefer to keep God at arm’s length. We prefer a God whom we can visit on Sundays, but who will not be too terribly involved in our lives on the other days.

But remember, Dear Hearts and Gentle People, that alienation from God always results in alienation from people. It results in the less-than-wholehearted embrace of our fellow church members and our neighbors. It results in coldness to and detachment from God’s needy and suffering children.

II.

A truth about us that we must face is that we really do need some kind of conversion experience--but on a continual, daily basis, not as a once-in-a-lifetime event. We need this, not in a blinding light experience such as Paul had on he Damascus Road, but every day on Highway 140. We need the kind of quiet, completely undramatic experience that is contained in deciding, moment by moment, to continue in the faith we profess.

We are not called to “walk the sawdust trail,” as responding to altar calls was described in the old days of big brown tent revivals with sawdust in the aisles. We are called to continue--to continue--in the faith we have professed. And to continue in the faith means to examine continually both the context and the content of our lives.

Being reconciled with God is not a matter of one dramatic spiritual event; it is a matter of daily decision making. Every day, I must decide anew to continue in the faith, to follow Jesus Christ. In every human encounter, I must remind myself that I am looking at and talking to a child of God.

To continue in the faith is to seek reconciliation with all God’s children. In the church at Colossae, the most important need for reconciliation was between Jewish and Gentile Christians. To make peace between two groups with different histories and different customs and a long record of despising and excluding one another, as these two groups did in Colossae, is peacemaking worthy of Christ. Analogous in our world and time is peacemaking between blacks and whites, women and men, Orientals and Occidentals, Arabs and Jews, haves and have-nots, old and young, management and labor, religious liberals and conservatives, and even--even--between Republicans and Democrats--because God loves all of them and all of us.

Such reconciliation is not an easy task. The Greek word Paul used for his toil and striving is literally translated “agony,” and he depended on energy from God to get it done. But to continue in the faith is to try to bring about some reconciliation--not in Iraq or Pakistan--but where you live and work.

III.

Our lesson from Colossians concludes with Paul setting out his great aim. It is to warn every person and teach every person and to present every person mature

in Christ. Here is the very dream of God for your life.

The word “mature” was chosen carefully, I think, because it was a technical term in the Greek mystery religion for the fully initiated cult member. The church at Colossae was being troubled by the influence of pagan religion as well as by divisions between Jews and Gentiles.

The Jews, before coming into the Christian church, would never have believed that God was the God of the Gentiles, or even cared about them. The Gnostics and the mystery religionists would never have believed that the elaborate and esoteric knowledge they thought necessary for salvation would ever have been the possession of more than a select few.

But in Christ, everyone may attain fullness and wholeness of life. The fact is that the only thing--the only thing--that exists for every man and every woman in the world is Christ.

There are gifts of thought and understanding and skill and talent that will never be the common possession of all people. There are privileges and pleasures that all will never share. There are heights of achievement that all will never scale. But to every man and every woman, the good news of what God has done in Christ is open and free, and the power of God to transform our lives into newness is readily available to all who desire it. We need only to ask for it. Amen.

Fulfilling the Law of Christ, Galatians 6: 1-10 by Rev. Charles Swann

As you know, Janell and I returned a couple of weeks ago from one of my dream trips. It was a tour of some sites in the West that I had always wanted to see, and for this reason I had talked her into going on an organized tour with me. The hotels were excellent, the food was first-rate, the tour company’s arrangements and care of us were faultless. In short, we had a wonderful time.

More than a few times on the trip, I thought to myself, “This is the life: riding comfortably through some magnificent scenery, with somebody else doing all the work. I could live like this.”

But I knew that I could not live like that. That guy relaxing on the bus was only one aspect of Charles Edward Swann, not the whole person. I could not live like that. The things that are wrong with such a fantasy are (1) I couldn’t afford it; (2) I would go crazy without some meaningful, creative work to do; and (3) I would drive Janell crazy.

I have known only two men who did not work. One of them had inherited enough money to be able to spend his days hunting and fishing and doing little else. He was widely considered by the community to be nothing more than a likeable bum with pocket money. That, in fact, was what he was. The other man I knew who did no work had married the sole heiress to a sizable fortune. He pretended to be involved in one business endeavor or another, when in fact he was not, and gradually drifted into clinical depression, at least in part because he knew that people were laughing at him.

A life without work does not work. What does work is a life of creative, productive effort punctuated by times of leisure. I know this, but still I have experienced at least the temptation of unending, selfish leisure, of a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure. And that helps me to see inside those who are motivated by nothing more than the satisfaction of their hedonistic impulses.

I.

Too many people live lives centered on themselves alone. They live by what I call the “gospel of me, myself and I.” Now, all of us think about ourselves most of the time, but to far too many people, self becomes the sole reason for being. They live totally secular lifestyles that proclaim that their lives are centered on themselves.

Among younger people especially, this attitude of self-absorption is typified by a culture revolving around cultures, cars, clothes and sexual conquests. Among those who are little older, and who live less flamboyant lifestyles, we are likely to find that their lives of are of little benefit to anyone but themselves and perhaps their immediate families.

The most self-absorbed, self-centered people in the world are little babies. They are conscious of no needs and wants other than their own. Nothing in this world matters to infants except the satisfaction of their bodily needs and their personal comfort levels. We accept this in little babies. We do everything we can to satisfy their little needs and wants. But as they grow older, we teach them that other people also are important and we expect them to grow out of their total preoccupation with themselves. We hope they will learn, and we try to help them learn, that a good life comprises giving as well as taking.

Unfortunately, some people never grow up all the way to the point of finding a balance between giving as well as taking. They live lives with no sense of personal obligation for personal service to others or to the community in which they live. They live lives with a view of the problems of their society that concludes with the opinion that “they” ought to do something--and it never occurs to them that they are part of the “they.”

Their religious lifestyles, if they profess a religion, are characterized more by poverty of experience than practice. Their religion focuses on themselves, rather than on God. They hear a call to worship God as a summons to gather some more spiritual goodies, some more feel-good experience for themselves.

Their self-absorption may result in indifference or rejection of any church involvement or attendance and is heard in the often-repeated phrase, “I don’t get anything out of it.” This tragic expression almost always comes from a person who has not put anything into it.

Their self-righteousness is reflected in the voicing of their opinion that the church is full of hypocrites. My reply is, “Yes, but we are all trying to get over it. What about you?” Or they may say that the organized church has too much politics and bureaucracy in it. My reply is, “Yes, but human beings have never found a way to operate without these things. Do you know of a way? Come and show us how.”

The self-satisfaction of some people is reflected in their declarations of how they try to live good lives, how they try to be good persons. But Jesus made it very clear that the avoidance of sin is only one-half of the life that God has in mind for us. The other half involves doing good, not just being good.

And some of these folks seem to feel that self-perpetuation should be the goal of their religion. They are the ones who feel no need for any kind of church experience for themselves, but who feel that it is important for the children to go to Sunday School and get some religious training. My question is, “Why? So they can grow up to be as superficial as their parents?”

I am a cantankerous old man, and I have just vented about some of the things that bother me about the unexamined lives that some people live. But having spoken about these things, I cannot let them pass without confessing my guilt on every point I have just mentioned. I cannot claim innocence on any aspect of the self-centered, selfish life I decry. May God be merciful to me, a sinner, on every one of these points, and continually call me back to my calling.

II.

The antithesis of self-centeredness is the realization that God has put us together in this world to be helpers and supporters of each other, and it includes the cheerful willingness to live and work according to that realization. And in doing so, we fulfill the law of Christ.

When this realization comes to me, it dawns on me that, truly, no man or woman is an island. It seems like yesterday, but it was actually 44 years ago that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel released a song called “I Am A Rock.” It became a hit because it spoke to the sadness that so many people felt. A couple of the verses go like this:

I’ve built walls,

A fortress deep and mighty,

That none may penetrate.

I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.

It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain.

I am a rock.

I am an island.

I have my books

And my poetry to protect me;

I am shielded in my armor,

Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.

I touch no one and no one touches me.

I am a rock.

I am an island.

And a rock feels no pain;

And an island never cries.

Part of the singer’s sadness is reflected in the words, “If I never loved, I never would have cried.” How sad--when we know that trying to be a rock, an island, will only increase, make worse, one’s sadness.

When we begin to realize that, truly, no man or woman is or can be an island, we are on the verge of changing the question of “what can I get out of it?” into the questions of what can I put into the human relationships that are all around me, beckoning to me, inviting me. Then we see the I-don’t-get-anything-out-of-it attitude for what it is: pure babyhood, infantilism masquerading as adulthood.

When we see this for what it is, participation in the common life and in service to others can be seen and experienced as a source of satisfaction rather than a chore. We begin to see that other people have problems and we have the energy and the means to help them. We begin to see that people are, many times, not responsible for what happens to them, and they need our help. And thus, we begin to fulfill the law of Christ.

You and I, too, will have burdens. And the interdependence of the Christian community will be a source of strength and comfort and help to us, too. In the face of these realizations, “me, myself and I” becomes changed and expanded into “we.”

III.

One of the signs of emerging Christian maturity, growing from the babyhood of self-absorption into the adulthood of responsibility, is that we occasionally find ourselves doing good just for the sake of doing good. And so we fulfill the law of Christ.

We are perhaps growing up a bit in our spiritual pilgrimage when we begin to feel that we are what we are, and we are where we are, not merely for our own sake, but for the sake of others.

Why do people want to retire from the world of work? It is, I think, because our minds and bodies simply grow tired of meeting the demands of work. The world of work seems to become one long demand on energy and strength that we just don’t have in such generous measure in our older years. The pains of arthritis replace the pull of ambition, and we get up one morning and say, “I just don’t want to do this anymore.” And some of us have to say we just can’t do this anymore.

It is just as possible to grow weary in well-doing. Sometimes, the Christian life can seem to consist of one long demand--on our substance, on our time, on our patience, on our love, on our faith. We do get tired of responding to others, and we do get the feeling that there has often not been a great deal of responding to us. These feelings are natural and normal.

But there is a source of rest and refreshment and renewal. And it is the Lord who inspired us to exert ourselves in the first place.

The church has been represented by a lot of similes and metaphors. One of the homeliest, but I think one of the most apt, is that of an auto service station. I am talking about the old days when a service station was a place to get service, not just a convenience store that sells gasoline. The service station of the good old days was a place where you could go to get refueled and repaired, get your flats fixed and your batteries recharged.

I like to think of the church that way: a place where you can get what you need to hit the road again, ready to roll. (A fellow named Jesus is the station manager, but he has lots of helpers who are ready to help you.)

But I would not have you think it is necessary to come to church to get refueled and recharged, because Jesus has a helper out on the road. I am glad that in the Atlanta metro area we have people patrolling the interstate highways who are called HEROs. That stands for highway emergency response operator. Out of gas? Got a flat tire? Your battery dead? A HERO will help you. The helper God in Christ sends to aid us when we are out of gas and our batteries are dead is the Holy Spirit. One of the functions of the Spirit is to bring us spiritual renewal, whenever we need it and wherever we are. All we have to do is ask for help. Whenever we need it and wherever we are.