8-30-09 Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Brian K. Jensen

I’D RATHER SEE A SERMON…

     I’ve been reading a book of late entitled Amish Grace that was loaned to me by Cathy O’Shea.  It’s really the story of how the Amish community at Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania forgave Charles Carl Roberts for shooting ten little girls in an Amish schoolhouse.  I think it also personifies verse 22 of the passage I read from the book of James.  James writes, “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.”  The book reveals the power of living what we believe.  Listen to this.

     In late October of 1991, Aaron and Sarah Stolzfus were joined together  in holy matrimony.  Following traditional Amish honeymoon custom, they went to visit extended family for a little while.  One Sunday afternoon they were returning home – as you might suspect – by way of horse and buggy.

     That very same day, seventeen-year-old Joel Kime came home from church, grabbed a bite to eat, then headed off to a soccer game with his brother and two friends.  Driving his family’s old AMC Concord – and eager to show off its power – he had already hit 70 miles an hour as he crested a hill on a narrow country road.  Up ahead was Aaron and Sarah’s horse and buggy, but Joel Kime decided to blow right past them.  At the last instant, Aaron and Sarah’s horse turned left…and Joel Kime couldn’t avoid them.  Sarah died in the hospital that night.

     On Monday evening – the day after the accident – Joel Kime’s parents took him to Aaron and Sarah’s house.  He had never been to an Amish home before, and he was afraid of what they might do.  Much to his surprise, Aaron’s grandmother hugged him and expressed her forgiveness.  So did Aaron’s father.  It happened again when Sarah’s parents put their arms around him and said, “We forgive you.”  Joel Kime himself said, “It was unbelievable.  It was totally, absolutely amazing.  I cannot express the relief that floated over me.”

     In a back room of the farmhouse Kime met Aaron, the shattered husband, staring at his deceased bride in a wooden coffin.  Kime said, “How can I ever repay you?”  Kime describes what happened next this way.  “He simply forgave me.  We hugged as the freedom of forgiveness swept through me.”

     Even at his trial, the Amish people wrote letters to the judge, begging   for his pardon.  Legally it was impossible for the judge to acquit Kime,     but because he was a minor, he did manage to avoid prison.

     The relationship between Kime and the Stolzfus family continued.  They got together about once a year in each other’s houses.  Five years after the accident, Kime invited them to his own wedding.  They came for the ceremony and the reception, bearing gifts.  Later, Kime and his wife became missionaries overseas, and the Stolzfus family helped support them financially.

     That, my friends, is the power of forgiveness.  That’s what it means to be doers of the word and not hearers only.  We see how it literally transformed the transgressor.  He ultimately became a missionary overseas. 

     So we’ve seen how forgiveness – living one’s faith – can transform the transgressor.  But what about the transgressed?  What does forgiveness –    or living one’s faith – do for the one who was hurt?

     To answer that question, let’s take a look at the Nickel Mines shooting itself.  Charles Carl Roberts, a local man who drove a milk truck, burst into the school on Monday, October 2, 2006.  I’m not going to go into all the gory details.  Suffice it to say that Roberts shot ten little girls, and five of them did not survive.  Roberts then, of course, turned the gun on himself.

     Shortly thereafter, the Amish community got to thinking about how devastated Charles Roberts’ family must be.  They went to them and they forgave them.  The Amish gave money to help the family out.  Many of them even attended Charles Roberts’ funeral.  As one of the Amish ministers put it, “If I hold a grudge for one day, it is bad.  If I hold it for two days, it’s worse.  If I hold a grudge for a year, then that man is controlling my life.  Why not just let go of the grudge now?”

     Like I said, forgiveness can transform the transgressor.  I think we can also clearly see that forgiveness transforms the transgressed.  It keeps us from becoming bitter.  It keeps us from dwelling on thoughts of hatred or vengeance or anger.  No one’s spirit can be at peace when such thoughts fill one’s mind.  Forgiveness transforms the transgressed as well.

     That does not happen overnight, of course.  According to Everett Worthington, author of the book Forgiveness and Reconciliation, there are actually two types of forgiveness.  There is decisional forgiveness, and there is emotional forgiveness.  Decisional forgiveness is essentially the decision not to act out of bitterness or revenge.  In other words, it is a conscious choice.   But that doesn’t always leave us feeling that we’re over the injustice.

     That’s where emotional forgiveness comes into play.  Emotional forgiveness happens when negative emotions – things like resentment, or hostility, or even hatred – are replaced by positive feelings.  Thus, perhaps we could say that forgiveness is both a short-term act and a long-term process.  In fact, the initial decision to forgive may actually spark the emotional change.  A decision to forgive does not mean a victim has erased bitter emotions, but I think it does mean that emotional transformation IS more likely to follow.

     Of course, the Amish look at this a little bit differently than do most Protestants.  The Amish come out of the Anabaptist tradition.  Anabaptist literally means “rebaptizer.”  At the time of the Reformation, many Anabaptists were persecuted; some were even burned at the stake.  Thank God we don’t settle our differences that way any more!

     Most Protestants believe that we forgive because we have been forgiven.  We call it the doctrine of justification.  By the grace of God in Jesus Christ, we have been forgiven.  Anabaptists believe that they must forgive in order to be forgiven.  To us, that’s salvation by works, but the Anabaptists have good reason for believing what they do.

     What do we say every Sunday morning when we recite the Lord’s Prayer?  We say, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”  To the Anabaptist, the failure to forgive means that they will not be forgiven themselves. We are asking God to forgive us in the same manner that we forgive other people.  It’s a pretty sound line of reasoning, don’t you think?  It is clearly a call for us to live the faith we profess.  It is clearly a call to be doers of the word, and not hearers only.

     This business of being doers of the word and not hearers only has been on my mind a lot lately.  Specifically, I’ve been wrestling with the issue of where we went wrong.  We had a fabulous vision a number of years ago when we called an Associate Pastor for Congregational Life and an Associate Pastor for Congregational Care.  As someone said in one of our cottage meetings, “We’ve done all these things before, just not at the same time.”  It seemed like a vision come from God.  If we made one mistake, I thought, it was that we tried to be all things to all people.  In any case, it did not work.  And I’ve been trying to understand why.  Why did God allow us to fail?

     I came across a pertinent article from The Alban Institute entitled, “The Bi-vocational Congregation.”  I want to read a little bit of that article to you now.  It says:

Any garden-variety atheist, agnostic, or even religiously indifferent materialist knows that if – and we do mean if – the church is to survive well into the future…it won’t be through a linear extension of today’s church.  Every index of the church as it has been indicates a decline, and many indicate a precipitous decline.  So what might tomorrow’s different church look like?

 

We believe the bi-vocational congregation offers a viable model for tomorrow’s church.  A bi-vocational congregation is a local church that operates upon two callings: the calling of function and the calling of mission.  We believe the bi-vocational congregation is more likely to survive into tomorrow to do God’s will and be God’s people because it is essentially organized around spiritual realities in tune with God’s redemptive work.

     So what is the problem?  Perhaps we’ve become too reliant upon paid staff to do the mission for us.  Maybe we need to become doers of the word and not hearers only.  Maybe every single member of this church needs to find a mission of his or her own.

     Lyle Schaller, the guru on church growth and leadership in the 1980s,

once said, “People used to join the church and say, ‘How can I help this church meet its needs?’  Today people join the church and say, ‘How can this church help meet my needs?’”  Do you see how we’ve turned it around?  Do you see how the culture of consumerism has gotten it backwards?

     You’re going to hear more about this in the days and weeks that lie ahead.  We need to become doers of the word and not hearers only.  We need to live the life of faith we profess, rather than try to get by by doing the least we can.  So I’m just going to end this sermon with a poem by a man named Edgar Guest.  I modified it a bit, but listen closely to the words just the same.

I’d rather see a sermon than hear one any day.

I’d rather one would walk with me than merely tell the way.

 

          The eye’s a better pupil, and more willing than the ear.

          Fine counsel is confusing, but example’s always clear.

 

The best of all the Christians are those who live the creed,

For to see good put in action, is what all the world needs.

 

          I can soon learn how to do it if you let me see it done.

          I can catch your hands in action, but your tongue too fast may run.

 

And the lecture you deliver may be very wise and true,

But I’d rather get my lesson by observing what you do.

 

          And all the world can witness that the best of guides today,

          Are not the ones that tell them, but the ones who show the way.

Amen.

 

8-23-09 Sermon by Rev. Dr. Brian K. Jensen

FAIR WEATHER FRIENDS

     I think I’ve told you the following story before, but I’ve recently had a new insight on it and it’s pertinent to where we’re headed today, so please bear with me.  About ten years ago, I had a woman in my church by the name of Elaine Best.  Now Elaine was about as dedicated a Christian and as hard-working a deacon as any minister could ever hope to have.  Yet Elaine had a major concern in her life and she shared it with me one day over coffee.

     Elaine’s daughter was married to a brilliant young man.  He was a neurosurgeon by trade and had earned a Ph.D. on top of that.  So in other words, this guy taught neurosurgeons how to do neurosurgery.  Like I said, he was a brilliant young man.

     The problem, in Elaine’s mind, was that this brilliant young man did not believe in God.  It was a concern primarily, I suspect, because he was the father of her grandchildren.  Elaine would do her level best to present her case for belief in God to him, but he would shoot her down at every angle.  I said, “Let me have a crack at him.”   Elaine said, “Oh, he’d kill you in an argument!”

    I said, “That may be true.  But here’s what I’d say.  I’d say, ‘It’s a mistake to think that we have the luxury of choosing or rejecting God completely on our own.  God first chooses us and once God chooses us, we can’t help but respond.  The grace of God is irresistible.  In other words, if God wants you, God’s gonna get you.  The reason you don’t believe in God is because God has not chosen you.’”

     Elaine said, “You can’t say that!”  And that was pretty much the end of our discussion.  But there’s a reason why I like to present that particular argument to atheists.  First of all, it’s theologically sound.  The Church has always believed that God first chooses us and then we respond.  That’s what verse 65 means in the passage I just read.  And the reason I do it is because it puts the atheist on his or her heels.  It really makes them rethink their position when someone says to them that maybe the problem isn’t that they’ve rejected God, but rather, maybe the problem is that God has rejected them.  No one wants to think that God may have rejected them.

     John Calvin, the so-called “father” of the Reformed tradition, would have agreed with me whole-heartedly.  He was an advocate of what we call “double predestination.”  In other words, there are the elect and there are the reprobate.  The elect God has chosen from the beginning of time.  The reprobate God has rejected from the beginning of time.  It sounds a bit harsh, perhaps, but Calvin’s ideas were merely a development of Augustine’s ideas some 1100 years before.  In other words, it’s what the Church has always taught. 

     It is important to know what the Church has always taught.  Although listen to this.  Some say in this day and age we have moved from an Encyclopedia Britannica faith to a Wikipedia faith.  No longer do we abide by the time-honored doctrines of the Church espoused by experts in the faith.  Now we’re just as likely to accept what pretty much anybody posits.  Moving from an Encyclopedia Britannica faith to a Wikipedia faith, my friends, is NOT a good thing!

     In any case, here’s how I’ve begun to rethink my position.  Karl Barth was arguably the greatest theologian of the 20^th century.  He struggled with the rigidity of double predestination as well.  Thus, he came up with a bit of a different spin.  He believed that in the person of Jesus Christ, God was saying “Yes” to the salvation of every human being.  Now before you throw your hands up in holy horror and say, “That sounds like universalism to me,” let me say this. 

     This is where free will comes into play.  God says “Yes” to everyone’s salvation in the person of Jesus Christ.  Yet some people choose to say “No” to God’s “Yes.”  In other words, God has chosen each of us, but some of us refuse to be chosen.  Barth’s ideas fit with the time-honored doctrine of the Church that says that God first chooses us, although the grace of God is no longer irresistible to him.  But Barth’s ideas do coincide with the time-honored doctrine of human free will.  God chooses all of us, and God wants all of us to follow his Son, Jesus Christ.  Yet some choose to say “No” to God’s gracious “Yes.”  There’s your theology lesson for the day.

     Jesus Christ himself was facing just such rejection in the passage we read from the gospel according to John.  He had recently fed the 5000 with but five loaves of bread and two fish.  He had an incredibly large and an incredibly enthusiastic following at the time.  But then Jesus began to talk about living bread.  He said things like, “You must eat my flesh” and “You must drink my blood.”  As we discovered last week, he was referring to the sacrament of communion and how he must be in us by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.  Yet the people who were listening to his words got hung up on the details.

     They said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”  The Greek word translated “hard saying” here is SKLAY-RAHS.  It means literally not “hard to understand,” rather, it means literally, “hard to accept.”  The crowds following Jesus found his words hard to accept.  Thus, as it says in verse 66, “After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.”  In other words, essentially they chose to reject Jesus Christ.

     Jesus faced a major defection.  People turned away from him, ostensibly to look for another Messiah.  What was the problem?  These people had come to Jesus Christ to get something from him.  When it came to suffering for him and giving something to him, they quickly turned away.  Again, these people had come to Jesus Christ to get something from him.  When it came to suffering for him and giving something to him, they quickly turned away.  Perhaps we could call them fair weather friends.

    Our passage also hints at Judas Iscariot’s betrayal.  Jesus said, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.  But among you are some who do not believe.”  Our passage goes on to note that Jesus knew from the start who were the ones who did not believe, and who was the one who would betray him.  So we see defection in the crowds that turned away from Jesus, but we also see defiance in the response of Judas Iscariot.

     As you know, Judas was one of the original twelve disciples.  He was a trusted member of the inner circle – so trusted that he was in charge of the disciples’ little treasury.  Some say Judas was a thief and that his betrayal of Jesus was simply true to   his character.  Others say that what Judas was really doing when he betrayed Jesus to   the Jewish high council was that he was trying to force Jesus’ hand.  He thought it would be better to overthrown the Roman government by force rather than to passively submit to it.  He also thought Jesus would never allow himself to be put to death on a cross.  Surely, Judas believed, Jesus would call upon a legion of angels to come and squash the hated Romans.  Jesus had laid out God’s plan for his own destiny, but Judas thought he had a better idea.  Judas’ response to Jesus was essentially one of defiance.  Yet again, perhaps, we could call someone a fair weather friend.

     Jesus is facing defection and defiance.  He sees the crowd turn away from him when he tells them that following him will not be all wine and roses, and he knows in his heart what Judas is preparing to do.  So he turns to his disciples – he turns to his inner circle – and says to them, “Do you also wish to go away?”  Peter responds, “Lord, to whom can we go?  You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”

     Peter’s bold confession here shows that he is no fair weather friend.  Of course, we also know that once Jesus was arrested and condemned, Peter denied him three times in the courtyard of the high priest, but that’s beside the point for now.  Peter made a bold confession of faith.  It is one that each of us should be bold to make as well. 

     Speaking of bold confessions of faith, listen to this.  His name was Bill.  He had wild hair, wore a T-shirt with holes in it, ragged jeans and sandals.  This was literally Bill’s wardrobe for his entire four years of college.  But Bill was bright.  And Bill had also become a Christian while he was in college.

     Across the street from his apartment was a very well-to-do and a very prim and proper Presbyterian Church.  Sure, they had talked about welcoming people who were not the same as them, but they weren’t exactly sure how to do so.  One Sunday morning, Bill decided to attend a worship service there.  He walked into the church wearing the very same clothes he always wore. 

     By the time Bill arrived, the service had already started.  Bill walked down the aisle looking for a place to sit, but the people were already in their favorite pews and there was nowhere left to sit.  By this time, people were getting a bit uncomfortable, but of course, nobody said a word.

     Bill got closer and closer to the pulpit and when he realized there were no seats left, his simply plopped right down on the floor. The tension in the church was so thick you could have cut it with a knife.  About this time, from the back of the church, an elder started slowly making his way to Bill.  This elder was in his eighties, had silver hair and wore a three-piece suit; a Godly man, very elegant, very dignified, very refined.  He walked with a cane and began making his way toward Bill.  Everyone thought to themselves that you couldn’t really blame the elder for what he was about to do.  How could you expect a man of his age and his background to tolerate some college kid on the floor?

     It seemed to take an eternity for the elder to reach the boy on the floor.  The church was utterly silent except for the clicking of the man’s cane on the floor.  All eyes were focused on him; you could have heard a pin drop.  Even the minister can’t start his sermon until the elder does what he has to do.

     Then the congregation saw this elderly man drop his cane on the floor.  With great difficulty, he lowered himself and sat down next to Bill so he wouldn’t have to worship alone.  Everyone was choked up with emotion.

     The minister then strode to the pulpit and said, “What I’m about to preach, you will likely never remember.  But what you have just seen, you will likely never forget!

     That elderly elder made a bold confession of faith.  He was no fair weather friend, for by his actions, he revealed the depth of his commitment.  Think about your own level of commitment.  How bold are you willing to be?  How do you respond when God asks something of you?  How do you respond when your church asks something of you?  The church, of all places, should never be foundering in attendance, or scrambling to find Sunday school teachers, or beating the bushes for financial support, or failing to welcome those who are not like us…not when its members are committed; not when we refuse to be fair weather friends.  Amen.