“Last of All”

Robert Montgomery

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost—August 29, 2010

First Presbyterian Church, Pulaski, TN

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NEW TESTAMENT READING:  Luke 14:1-14

On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely. ² Just then, in front of him, there was a man who had dropsy. ³ And Jesus asked the lawyers and Pharisees, “Is it lawful to cure people on the sabbath, or not?” ⁴ But they were silent. So Jesus took him and healed him, and sent him away. ⁵ Then he said to them, “If one of you has a child or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on a sabbath day?” ⁶ And they could not reply to this.

⁷ When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. ⁸ “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; ⁹ and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. ¹⁰ But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. ¹¹ For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

¹² He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. ¹³ But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. ¹⁴ And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Perhaps you are like me and have been duped by the Cattails Association of North America into believing that cattails are a quaint, picturesque part of Americana that everyone would surely want to see everywhere you look.   The association must be behind all those pictures I have seen in doctors’ offices and hotels—the painting of a beautiful duck taking wing from a delightful pool of water, and framing the whole picture in our eyes and our hearts is a lovely, elegant stand of…cattails.

I suspect that virtually all of you know what cattails are, and you may only be in some doubt about whether I am talking about what it “sure sounds like” I am talking about.  Do I mean those green plants that spring up around the edge of lakes and ponds and creeks and produce a furry brown stem loaded with seeds numbering more than the stars of heaven?   Yes.  That’s it exactly.

For the last few years, cattails have figured into my life more than I would like to recall.  It’s all because of the pond on our family farm in Marshall County.  

It’s never been a large pond, nor a particularly striking one.  But it has been there for nearly a century, and it has watered farm animals and wild animals faithfully during that time.  Until a few years ago.

I suppose that most ponds require dredging or cleaning out every so often, and I remember some of those efforts through the years.   But a few years ago, a huge oak tree fell into the pond, blocking its small feeder source and loading the pond with limbs and leaves. 

Now in a community like ours, with the pond visible from “the highway,” this was a major news event.  “Did you hear about the Montgomery pond?”  “Oh, it’s a shame.  That’ll be the death of a pond if that tree stays in there.”

So, while it took two chainsaws, a tractor and a four-wheeler, I got that oak tree out of that pond.  

But then the next act in the drama began.   Cattails began to appear.

And this, too, made the local news.   But then the dry weather hit a few years ago, and the pond dried up completely.    This led to an explosion of weeds that made cattails indeed seem adorable by comparison. 

By a fortunate turn of events, an opportunity dig out the pond while it was dried up appeared, and after a day’s work by both an excavator and a bulldozer, the pond was cleaned out and ready for weather that would fill it again.   And sure enough, the weather finally cooperated.  The pond was back.  Frogs, turtles, even fish somehow, some way. 

And cattails.

This too made the local news, and it led to controversy.   Are cattails a “sure sign of a healthy pond”? Or, the “sure sign of the end of that pond”?   There seemed no end to the argument, either among the local experts  or in my own head.  

Now what I knew was that when I was growing up, there had never been cattails in the pond, and after seeing how quickly the cattails were beginning to crop up all around the pond and increasingly in the pond itself, I decided it was time for action.

I have a confession to make that actually last year, I made my first move against the cattails by putting Rob on the “carry-all” that we use to haul firewood on the back of the tractor, and I backed him out over the pond as far as I could.   I admit I got a little impatient with what appeared to me—from the safe distance of the tractor seat—to be less than a wholehearted, full-commitment effort.   I mean, really, how hard could this be?   I thought we might repeat the process this spring and finish the job.   But by April I knew that particular plan was hopeless.  The cattails were spreading.   All spring and summer I turned over my next move.

So, finally this past Thursday, I bought a pair of waders.  Real waders.  Chest high.  Cleated boots and steel shank insteps.   This made the local news at our house when I tried them on with Emma taking pictures, which are probably soon to appear on the church’s website.  

Now, not knowing about chest waders, little did I know that the suspenders are not included.  So, being a farm boy engineer, I rigged up some using binder twine.  I planned for the worst, or so I thought, by packing an extra pair of clothes, because I really didn’t want my mother knowing about the cattails at all, or my plan to remove them.

Now, I had always obsessed over these cattails from the safe distance of a tractor seat, and in my mind, I recalled four or five “patches.”   Now, really, how long could it take to remove “four or five patches of cattails?”  I bid the job in at 45 minutes to an hour.  

I felt like Godzilla closing in on an unsuspecting miniature town in Japan, walking like a thunderfoot over the edge of the pond and finally into the water.  The first cattail I came to was about 12 inches high, and I decided to be methodical about this task, and take each one as they came. 

It should have told me something when I pulled on that first small cattail only to see a very large one more than 6 feet away begin to sway and shudder.   But my thoughts were interrupted by another lesson in physics and human anatomy.

As I pulled on that small cattail, I rediscovered something fascinating that there are two parts of your body that potentially come into play to catch you when you are off-balance.   The first is one of your feet, whichever is responsible at the moment for carrying or holding up less of your body weight.  It’s a simple little demonstration I can show you any time.  Your free foot instinctively jumps about a foot and a half behind you or in front of you and catches you so you can regain your balance.  

But the word “free” no longer applies to either of your feet when you are standing in a good 6 to 8 inches of pond muck while wearing chest waders.   So as I yanked on that cattail, I suddenly felt it give way, which threw most of my body weight backward, also revealing to me just how much I lacked a free foot.

Which brought the other part of the human body into play that can stop you from cracking your head on rocks or concrete when you are falling backward, and I landed solidly on mine, which then gently deposited me in the mud flat on my back.   The sky was lovely that day, high cumulus at maybe 15,000 feet, which made the little sprig of cattail I was holding in my right gloved hand look all the more green—and small. 

Suffice it to say, that within the next few minutes, I looked like one of those scientists who go rushing into a swamp to try to grab hold of a 30 foot anaconda buried in the mud and drag it out onto solid ground.  I was down on my knees in the water and mud wrestling with these cattails, only to have them snap off in my hands with a jolt or finally give up and come loose with a 15 pound root ball of water and mud attached. 

And it was about this time—after about 30 minutes of this nonsense and out of breath for the fifth time—that another thought came to me, which was, “Why in the world am I out here doing this?”   And why in the world am I out here by myself doing this?”    The dragonfly in front of me seemed to think this was an excellent question.   Where was brother, who, after all, is the golden child of the family?   Or my sister, who is the oldest and by all rights the one with the most responsibility?  No, here I sat in the mud, with those twine suspenders sawing my shoulders in half on both sides, my gloves falling apart in my hands, and mud smeared and blotched all over me, nearly up to the top of the waders?   Yes, why indeed. 

I could only think of only two reasons for why I was out there, and I haven’t been able to add to them since then.   One is that I could go back to my brother and my sister and say to them, “You sorry people left me out there to do all the work all by myself, because I am the only one who ever does any of the hard work around here.”   But that sounded all too much like things I said when I was 8 years old, and I heard a parable or two of Jesus begin to play in my head, parables about vineyard workers and a whining brother.  Besides, I knew that my brother and sister would have reason on their side when they would say to me, “Look, if you are goofy enough to go out there all by yourself, then you deserve what you get.” 

That left me with the only other explanation, as inconceivable as it was to me and probably will be to you, too.  And that is simply this:  I love this farm, and I love this pond. 

Loving a pond.  I blush to say it out here in public.  How can anyone love a pond?

I remind you that this is not a large pond, nor a particularly pretty one.  

But eight years ago this past week, my father suffered his stroke that left the farm in need of others to care for the farm, a farm that he loved so much none of us will ever be able to disassociate it from him or him from it.   I loved the farm—and the pond along with it—because I had come to love what my father loved, like his father before him.

In fact, it was my grandfather, from whom I have my own middle name, who dug the pond.   And my uncle, from whom I have my first name, used to love to fish in it.   They were all out there with me at the pond that day. 

Now, whether you can believe it or not, it was actually when I was sitting out there in the mud, seemingly all alone, tired and covered in pond smell with the water looking like the Bloody Lane at Shiloh that I heard the “Word of God for me” from this week’s Scripture readings. 

After all, what does Jesus mean when he tells people to take the worst seat in the house at a wedding?   We go to weddings to feel the power of the occasion, and you can watch people craning their necks all the time to be able to see what is going on.     Wouldn’t taking the lowest seat be a lot like calling up a ticket office and saying, “Do you have any seats behind a post?   I’ll take that one.”  It would be like going to a football game with 50-yardline tickets and scalping them for seats in the nosebleed section?    Let’s be realistic.  Who is going to do that? 

Why would anyone get in line and hope to wind up the last person in it?  Why would anyone want to be last of all or wind up being the person who does what no one else is ready to do?

Or, who is going to throw a party and invite a host of strangers to it, with the only requirement for admittance being that they cannot possibly pay you back—ever?    We had a wedding in our family in January, and we were at great pains to try to remember who had invited us to their own children’s wedding so we could be sure they got an invitation in return.  

Why, indeed, would anyone take the lowest seat, or hold a party for people who may not even bother to say thank you?  

I can think of only one reason at the end of the day—you have learned to love the people Your Father in Heaven loves. 

Surely, the world must appear to God to be in a lot more trouble than a pond with cattails and a lot more unpleasant and painful that having to wear chest waders held up with string for an hour or so.   Surely, the idea of truly loving our world and all us cattail-like people is much harder to imagine than my realizing that I love a small pond that, to be honest, is never going to pay me back in any way, shape or form.   Yet God loves our pond of a world.  

The only real reason Jesus would heal a man on the Sabbath when he knows that he is going to take a load of criticism for it is because Jesus loves what his Father loves—people, and especially people in trouble and in need of help.   Why?  I don’t know, except that the word “grace” fills my mind.

Why would Jesus take on human flesh, bring us into the banquet feast of the Kingdom of God, serve us and welcome us and give us the place of honor, like the prodigal we all are?   I have no idea, except that the words, “For God so loved the world…” must really, really be true.

What I do know is that as I sat out there in mud, all alone, with not even a frog to say, “thank you,” I felt two pulls.  One was to get up and trudge home with a wounded and angry self-righteousness, feeling like I had wasted an hour of my life that I would never get back and robbed of any way to throw my superior goodness up in someone else’s face—or, the other was to admit to myself that I really have learned to love what my grandfather, my father and my uncle, from whom I get my very identity loved.  And all the mud and all the seeming humiliation was worth it.  Because love is its own reward, for it fills the hole in our heart nothing else can.  And it makes us alive and filled with joy that no amount of mud or evil cattails can take away.

At least, these are my thoughts from a day at the pond.   I really thought that I would finish that “little problem with the cattails” and be done with it.  I even imagined coming to church today to say, “I have some brand-new chest waders that I don’t need and won’t ever be using again.”  But now I realize they are going to be a permanent part of my farm equipment.   Because loving the pond goes with loving the farm and all that it has meant and means to me and my family. 

What I want to say to you today is that my time at the pond showed me that it really is possible to take the lowest seat—in the muck of a pond—and it truly is possible to care for people that can’t or won’t ever pay you back.

This week, just like every other week, I have personally seen so many of you here just in this building doing your regular “pond work.” David Fellman painting doors, Flora watering plants and working with Patsy Dunnavant to make sure the sanctuary has flowers.  Edna writing notes to newcomers.  The list goes on and on—and that is just here in this building.  No one thanks you.  It would be easy to think no one cares.   You take the lowest seat so that others can see and hear better at the wedding feast.  You pour out your love on us and our community, even though none of us can pay you back. 

But all these acts of love that you do, whether here at church, or at home or in the street, or in phone calls or in forgiving others or secretly doing good—God notices every single one of them.  For in doing them you show who your Father is and that you have learned to love who and what God loves.

This is the reason we are all here, even on the days we think we are all alone pulling up cattails in a pond that no one but you would ever bother with.   And the days that you do secretly what you believe God has called you to do, to invite in the person who would never otherwise get an invitation or a seat at the table. 

But you know God wants that to happen. 

Take heart.  Do what you know God loves to do.  You will find joy in them, now and in the life to come.  God will make it so.   Of this I have come to be as certain as I am of my own name, and where I got it. 

Amen.

“Liberty and Love”

Robert Montgomery

Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost—August 22, 2010

First Presbyterian Church, Pulaski, TN

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NEW TESTAMENT READING:  Hebrews 13: 18-29

You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, ¹⁹ and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them. ²⁰ (For they could not endure the order that was given, “If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned to death.” ²¹ Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.”) ²² But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, ²³ and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, ²⁴ and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

²⁵ See that you do not refuse the one who is speaking; for if they did not escape when they refused the one who warned them on earth, how much less will we escape if we reject the one who warns from heaven! ²⁶ At that time his voice shook the earth; but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.” ²⁷ This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of what is shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain. ²⁸ Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; ²⁹ for indeed our God is a consuming fire.

NEW TESTAMENT READING:  Luke 13:10-17

Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. ¹¹ And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. ¹² When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” ¹³ When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. ¹⁴ But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” ¹⁵ But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? ¹⁶ And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” ¹⁷ When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

Judaism is a religion rooted and anchored in a story of freedom.  The most basic “confession of faith” in Judaism goes like this:

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. ⁶ When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, ⁷ we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. ⁸ The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; ⁹ and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”

It’s a story of God liberating a powerless and oppressed people from slavery and bringing them into a “land flowing with milk and honey.”  I am reminded, at this moment, about another “land flowing with milk and honey.”

But to be a Jew, to come to synagogue, to come to worship was to remember and celebrate that story of freedom.  Indeed, the Sabbath itself is a reminder of that freedom and the gift of life that does not come from human ingenuity or human violence.   Instead, it is a gift of the God who created everything and who frees God’s creation from oppression of every kind.  In fact, one of the most fundamental obligations as a Jew is to sanctify the seventh day by resting from all work. 

Think about that a minute.  One of the most basic commandments in Judaism is to “take the day off.”   And to give the day off to all who work for you, both human and animal.  

We are used to the commandment, “Keep the Sabbath,” but it may be all too easy for us to walk right past the fact that God commands people to “take the day off,” when God could have chosen to exact something very hard from the children of Israel as “paying the debt” they owed to God.  When was the last time, in fact, that your employer said to you, “Look, take the day off, or you’ll need to look for another job”?

To be a Jew is to be called to remember what it means to brought from slavery to freedom, and make no mistake about it—true slavery into true freedom. 

That is what it means to be a Jew, and that was the whole point of being in synagogue on the Sabbath.

But as we human beings are regularly tempted, what God intends as a gift of liberty for us we can make feel like a heavy burden. 

As all of you know, Emma and I just got back from a trip to Boston to move Rob into Harvard Medical School.  Now, I think you would reasonably conclude that it is a huge blessing of grace to have a child accepted into medical school, maybe especially at Harvard.  But what I managed to do was to say to myself is, “I have to drive 1,167.3 miles to Boston.”    Never mind that I get to go where I in no way deserve to be.   Never mind that I get to spend time in the car alone with Emma for more time than we often spend together alone in a month.  No, I had to see it as, “I have to drive 1,167.3 miles to Boston.” 

So, perhaps people that day in synagogue, like many of us in church, were thinking, “Oh great, I have to go to synagogue today,” never minding the fact that we don’t have to go to work today precisely because God gave us the day off.    “We have to go to church to worship God,” is an interesting way to react to that God’s gift of freedom from oppression and slavery. 

That may be tragic and depressing for us personally, but what Luke reminds us this morning is how tragic that can become for other people, who are seeking the very freedom we say we all come together to remember. 

So, on this Sabbath, in came “little old bent-over woman.”  She has been painfully bent over for 18 long years, but I suspect by this time, she was just an overlooked part of the landscape of the town.  Sure, there goes “little missus so and so,” as she would struggle to cross the road or carry a water jar on her head or firewood on her back.  Her enslavement to her ailment was just an “accepted and acceptable” part of life.

Jesus, however, sees her and decides this is a time to enact what it means to be Jewish, what it means to keep the Sabbath day and frees her from her ailment—after 18 long, long years.  

But the leader of the synagogue that day—like all too many of us religious leaders since then—sees Jesus’ act of compassion and liberation—such as the compassion and liberation that God has bestowed on Jews and Christians—as a violation of “our religious obligations.”

Just as we are all too tempted to turn worship into a burden rather than a remembrance of freedom, so we are all too tempted to turn “loving people” into work.  

The words of the synagogue leader have been repeated too many times by all our faith communities in one form or another.  The idea that helping people should not disturb our worship should be utterly incomprehensible, but unfortunately, there is a part of nearly all of us that actually tends to agree.

This is where our own sense of freedom is somehow being lost in us—and on both us and others. 

Surely a free people should seek the same freedom for others, wouldn’t they? 

Now, thanks be to God, this is indeed the legacy of Judaism and Christianity and every other expression of genuine faith at their best.  It is why Jews and Christians and other peoples who have experienced the gift of freedom after the experience of oppression and slavery and death have so often been at the forefront of liberation struggles all around the world on behalf of those who are enslaved in some way or another, bent over with hard circumstances.  

But sadly, it has not always been the case, and we Christians have less excuse than anyone else, as Hebrews would remind us today, for we dare to say and to believe that we have received an even greater gift of freedom than the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.

This trip to Boston that Emma and I just took was our first visit to Boston.  And, as you may know or guess, you cannot visit Boston and not see all kinds of signs and reminders of the American Revolution and the American quest for freedom.

Emma and I walked the “American Freedom Trail,” in fact.  The Old North Church. Boston Harbor.  The site of the Boston Massacre.  We saw Paul Revere’s grave.  Not far away is the grave of John Hancock and the grave of Samuel Adams.  There is a reference after reference to “freedom” and to “liberty.”   There is a big marker, in fact, with the words, “The American Dream of Liberty.”

We Americans get that.  And we should. We may fight for liberty or even argue over what liberty and freedom mean at different times in different ways and in different situations.  But we are right to hold tightly onto “freedom and liberty” as precious and even sacred words. 

And as Christians, we have reason to see those words in even deeper and more sacred terms.  Especially as Presbyterians, as children of the Reformed Tradition which enshrines a commitment to the “freedom of conscience” for every person.    It’s a big part of the reason we are Presbyterians, why we are gathered here today as Presbyterians, why this church building stands and we meet here on this Sunday Sabbath.

So, indeed, liberty is a hallmark we should never forget.  But Luke reminds us that freedom is not just meant for “us.”

Or as Paul puts it in his famous letter on Christian liberty, “For freedom Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, therefore, and never again submit to a yoke of slavery (to sin or to anyone else’s religious enslavement).” 

But he adds this, “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity selfishness, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  (Galatians 5: 1, 13-14)

Jesus says that to be a Jew that day in synagogue was to celebrate the liberty of a daughter of Abraham from an ailment that had enslaved her for 18 years.

And Paul says that freedom finds its truest expression, not in my own self-indulgence, but in love that seeks to give to others the same grace, gifts, comfort, relief and freedom that we have been given.

This is where we are in that same synagogue on the Sabbath that day in Luke 13.  Is liberty just a sacred gift for me, or is it the basis of a life of love in which freeing others from their pain and fears and poverty is where true joy and worship are found? 

I think the answer is found all throughout the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian New Testament, where the two great commandments are to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls and might, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. 

Are those meant to be burdensome commandments that crowd us with obligation and encroach on our liberty and freedom—or are they expressions of the freedom that keeps us from falling into new slaveries and new hostilities that are the deathknell of true freedom?   The Reformed Tradition has answered that they are freedom incarnate, for to live life

One of the other unexpected features of my life, besides this completely unexpected trip to Boston, is that I have been performing more weddings this summer than I can ever remember.  One of the Sundays I missed was to do a wedding in Oklahoma just two or three weeks ago.  I performed another one last night in Birmingham.  I have been asked to do one in Atlanta in September and another in Birmingham in October.   If any of you are interested in getting married, come see me.  I am on a roll and in good practice.

So, time and again lately, I have reason to think about what really is involved in a good marriage, a good relationship of any kind, and it seems to me that it is equal parts freedom and love.   Without freedom—that joy of discovering that another person wants us to truly be ourselves—love is strangled down into manipulation or control, if not abuse. 

On the other hand, if we are not willing to place love higher than our own personal liberty, then we would never be anything but lonely individuals or people who trade in relationships. 

Indeed, in a wedding service, we stand and say not that I will treasure my freedom above all else, but rather that I will honor and cherish the call and the way of love, above all else.

In that, we hear genuine echoes and memories of Biblical faith, for the God of all the universe and beyond, who is free from all claims and could have remained free from us has bound himself to us in love, at the cost of his own liberty, at least as compared to what being free of all covenants and promises would mean.

I want us unequivocally to be people committed to, aspiring to and delighting in freedom.  Jesus Christ has set us free from the law of sin and death and created us as free people.  We have been given what could be called a scary amount of freedom.  We are called to trust the work of the Holy Spirit rather than a law code to tell us what to do.

But the freedom is the freedom like God’s—it is the freedom to love.  Or as Paul says, “to love our neighbors as ourselves,” for this sums up the whole love in a single commandment.

This is who God is and how God lives:  free and yet living to free others.  Love which is never coercive, but is still committed and determined.  Freedom and love blended into a joy that celebrates our own life in love and freedom, but which seeks it and celebrates in and for others.

The little bent-over woman who came into the synagogue that day was not “work to be done and avoided” on the Sabbath but a reason to celebrate the freedom of God reaching out to embrace a daughter of Abraham, the way God brought the children of Israel out of slavery. 

Jesus took delight in the delight of that little bent-over woman standing up straight and being free.  Jesus was essentially risking his own freedom—at the cost of his own life—to extend that freedom out to her as the power and gift of love.

I treasure our freedom, as Americans, as Christians, as Presbyterians.

But I pray that our freedom, too, will be seen as a freedom expressing itself in love.  That we too may be seen as disciples of Jesus.

And that in being people of love, the world may see the freeing love of God at work in our world. 

Thanks be to God, for loving us, freeing us and freeing us to love.  Amen.

“Through Faith”

Hebrews 11: 29 – 12: 2 U August 1, 2010

Milton Nesbitt

About six weeks ago, I approached Robert about what he was going to preach on August 8^th and I hinted at and subtly challenged him to preach from Hebrews.  His first reaction was that Hebrews was a familiar passage but was hard to preach.  I was shocked by his response.  First of all, he is one of the most scholarly people I know and second I thought it would be easy since the topic of faith is the spiritual lifeline of Christianity.  Little did I know until I began my preparations his sage advice.  I really thought he did a good job, in fact, what else could I possibly say to add to what he already covered. 

As Robert mentioned last week that this Hebrews chapter is so full that hardly one sermon could do it justice.  His primary focus was on the first verse which so eloquently gives depth to the word faith.  I’ll spend my time building off of what he said by exploring how faith works. 

Here is how faith works … you’ve probably seen those high wire tight-rope walkers that cross from one tall building to another.  In a controlled environment, for a professional, this is not that difficult.  However, when you become exposed to the wind, the sun or the fact you are hundreds of feet in the air without a safety line, it is a little scary.  Some people have even walked on an 1100 foot tight-rope suspended 160 feet above the waters of the Niagara Falls.  One man did this and went onto repeat this act several times.  Each time he did something unusual, to give it a dramatic flair.  

This particular man even made the walk pushing a wheelbarrow.  When he reached the other side, he asked the spectators – “How many people believe I can do this again?”  They all cheered, “yes, you can do it.”  Then he asked the spectators, “How many people believe I can do this with a person sitting in the wheelbarrow.”  The crowd went crazy, “Yes, you can do it, you can do it.”  Can I have a volunteer?  There was nothing but silence. 

I am amazed at how some people who are so confident in their faith, who know concretely what faith is, what that assurance feels like and is convicted by that assurance.  My fear, and I am full of fear, is they may be confusing faith with righteousness.  Righteousness is doing what is morally right and they enjoy demonstrating their ‘moral rightness’ by beating their chest when they pray, to use a Wednesday night analogy.  In my own personal preparation I spent a lot of time trying to define faith for myself.  I finally realized that the author of Hebrews really had the right idea.  He used the word faith 26 times in connection with 19 different people.  What this tells me is that explaining faith is really hard, yet, painting a picture of people whose lives were changed through faith sets a tone, places a context, provides an atmosphere so that we might understand and relate better. 

As I mentioned, there are 19 people written about who were from diverse backgrounds.  None of them lived parallel lives.  What I mean by that is they did not have similar life experiences or similar socio-economic backgrounds.   But they are reported to have had great faith.  They were not perfect people.  A quick review reveals the list contains some murderers, (Moses & David), a prostitute, (Rehab), and an alcoholic, (Noah). 

I want to talk about a couple of them this morning.  Abraham is mentioned most often.  There is a reason his name is Abraham and not Milton.  I might have been ok with leaving my current location to follow God for a while but about 5 days into the journey, I would have given up on this pointless journey where I saw no benefit.  Truthfully, the further away from home I would have gone, the more uncomfortable I would have become.  I would have been increasingly less trusting as my Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) batteries were sure to have been dead by then.  Fear would have over taken me because easily my family and I could have been over taken by nomads and we would have never been heard from again.  Fear and paranoia would have sent me back home where I would feel I have a little more control over my situation.  

And then there is Noah.  Noah never could have been Milton either.  First of all, I didn’t get my Dad’s engineering genes.  Therefore, I wouldn’t have had faith that I could have built a large enough boat to hold my family and a bunch of animals and not capsize.  I can only image that Noah would have felt like I do on an airplane.  Because of the all the things on the boat, my family, all the animals, all the stored food, water etc. they would have been packed in their like a can of sardines.  I’ve never been on a plane for more than three hours at one time and I get stir crazy in that amount of time sitting there in that little cabin next to a little window, underneath the storage bin.  After about five days on that ark, not only would claustrophobia set in, what about that rank smell of poop?  Where did all it go, day after day?  Milton would have jumped overboard. 

How was their faith so developed?  How did Noah or Abraham have that much trust in a god that was not that very well proven, at least historically?  That is why I say my faith would have been challenged so much.  I am much too skeptical, much too conservative to step that far out in faith.  I am intellectually challenged by things that do not make, as they say in the country, ‘good walking around sense.’ 

For the early writer or writers of the Bible, what was it that they saw in these two people that they named faith?  Was it not this lifetime of internalizing the commanding and promising of this still invisible God and then stepping out in obedience?  They possessed some sort of readiness to accept a call to follow the lead of this God, to leave what was comfortable and take up as directed.  They embraced a vision, a covenant, a promise, a command.  What was it that allowed their heart a certain openness to respond to God?  Most importantly, how was it that their disposition was ready and willing to receive God and deny themselves their own life, goals, dreams or desires?  Fleshing out those questions is how faith works. 

I believe our faith has a connection to the past in that we see God’s faithfulness to Abraham, Noah and the other 17 listed.  I think for those listed in Hebrews Chapter 11, and even for us today, faith is a response to God’s faithfulness.  When you go to defining biblical faith, what you get is a story, a narrative picture.  This picture is about individuals like Abraham who has traveled, journeyed, walked, run, come and gone on paths under the command and promise of God.   For Noah, the picture is of one building, laboring, struggling, being ridiculed, persecuted and yet rose with the waters under the instruction and covenant of God.  As God usually does, God initiates action followed by our reaction.  We may not always be faithful in our response, but God certainly is always faithful to us. 

We see this history born in the Bible and it gives us comfort.  I look around my world, people I go to church with and work with and I see the stories of the Bible lived out with different names and faces.  I gain strength in knowing and seeing people responding to God’s faithfulness during different circumstances we are presented with every day.  No one ever enjoys seeing another struggle in life.  I wish the whole world was a placid place of peace, it is what I pray for, but that is not the reality in which we live.  Faith like an anchor is never fully appreciated until the waves of life begin to swale and knock us about.  There with faith we remain steady with our lifeline into the invisible world in which God lives. 

I am continually amazed and in awe of the people that faithfully show up here to this church, spiritually broken as they are, that have been robbed of loved ones through death, who have gone through painful divorces, who have lost the only means from earning income, who have intense medical situations.  They are internally driven, not out of loyalty or duty, but a deep desire, like those who responded in the book of Hebrews, to be called by God, gathered by the Holy Spirit in worship with others. 

This past Wednesday night I was talking with some friends and the conclusion I came to was how fragile each of our lives really are in that we seem to all be living so close to the edge of breaking down due to the gravity of our individual situations.  The problems we all have are different but we share a common thread in that we all pray, God take this cup that runneth over from me.  There is a healthy dose of anxiety and frustration, but the God of grace and mercy is always present, whether we feel him carrying us or not.  The faith I witness in the stories of the lives of these members is inspiring and perhaps that along with good fellowship is why we continue to be gathered here at the corner of Flower and 2^nd Street. 

The final point I wish to make is one important part of today’s scripture reading.  All of the people of the Old Testament were promised a messiah.  They all died living under the Law before receiving their promise and yet these are people who are held up as giants of biblical faith.  If they can have that measure of faith with an unfilled promise and we live knowing that Jesus, the Christ, fulfilled the Law, how much more ungrateful are we if we don’t have double or triple their faith?  A daunting thought isn’t it.  My hope is that we all mature into the ‘full stature of Jesus Christ’ growing ‘healthy in God and robust in his love.’

Since that time I delivered the Good Samaritan message, I have had several people share with me similar stories that lift the heart.  There have been stories where people trust in God, escape the comfort zone, and follow God’s lead through faith.  It’s not easy.  But faith designates a way of life that takes place in an intimate web of visible and invisible, silence and speech, light and darkness and in knowledge and mystery.  Faith cannot be learned or copied or even imitated.  We are left to our own to flesh out our faith, since we are all created as originals, even for twins, where we live by our faith. 

It seems on a personal level God continues to challenge me each month I prepare a sermon.  Last month it was failure to respond as a Good Samaritan.  Yesterday, as I was finishing this message on faith, the test came again.  I got a phone call, no not at 1:30am, it was not Bradley or Wesley, but my sister.  We never talk mid day on the weekend because we both are so busy with our families.  But I instinctively knew something was wrong.  She called to tell me she had taken my mom to the emergency room Friday night at 2:00am because her heart was once again beating too fast and occasionally missing a beat. 

I know there is nothing I can do, that I can’t control this situation, I can only trust in the fact that God is merciful.  As I anxiously await the results of her tests, I like so many of you have experienced similar situations; know that by we truly live by faith alone.  There are those like Thomas who doubt until they see.  Jesus says how much more blessed are those who believe without seeing.  Thanks be to God for God’s faithfulness to us and all the saints throughout all of history that came before us leaving this rich track record with God.  Amen.