Parson to Person -- by Rob Elder

Sunday, June 29, 2008

No Laughing Matter

The word sacrifice is one that we toss around rather casually in our day. Someone is said to have sacrificed for their family, another is reported to have sacrificed a night’s sleep in order to stay up with a worried friend. I recall that in my college years, as most of us do when we are young, I had to make decisions whether to take up one thing, and in so doing, preclude the possibility that I could do another. Somewhere between high school and our mid-twenties, we are forced to realize that while all possibilities may lie open to us, they don’t stay that way, we cannot pursue all of them. We must choose. I remember choosing to join the rally squad at my college in my sophomore year. It was a fun thing to do, leading cheers, learning stunts, throwing girls in the air and then seeing about catching them. By Spring I realized that commitment would preclude trying out for a lead in a musical in the drama department. I sacrificed something I loved for something that was fun. It wasn’t a tragedy, but I still recall thinking of it as a sacrifice.

An interesting word, that word sacrifice. We seldom use it in its original sense these days. It is entirely Latin in its roots, from sacrare, meaning sacred/set apart + facere, to make or to do. The basis of this word we often tend to use rather casually is to make sacred/set apart. So when we think of animals offered up on the altar in the Temple in Jerusalem, we think in terms of the word sacrifice. Something done in order to make something sacred. In this case, an offering of an animal in order to set things right with God again, a sort of rebalancing of the scales.

But, as I mentioned, sacrifice is a Latin word, the Hebrew of Genesis knows nothing of Latin. The Hebrew word used in our Genesis reading is ‘ola, “burnt offering.”

Burnt offering. What can be the meaning behind such a term to modern people, when the closest we come in our use of a word like sacrifice may mean nothing more than doing without a latté or a dinner out at the end of the month? And burnt offering, well, I don’t suppose we have much of any way to understand such a concept.

Or do we?

We at least know the word offering if we have been paying any attention at all when churches talk about their stewardship emphasis. The idea of a burnt offering takes the whole idea of an offering to God to another level. An offering in an envelope, a check to pay a tithe, those are things that have utilitarian purpose. But a burnt offering? There is no utilitarian purpose in taking a perfectly good lamb or goat, killing it, and tossing it on an altar to be burned into charcoal. And the absence of a utilitarian purpose reminds us that only God has created out of nothing, that all the things we see in the world that God has made are present through the action of a creating God for God’s own purpose, and not merely for our utilitarian purposes. So at the very least, a sacrifice by means of a burnt offering is a reminder in Genesis that all gifts are of God, and those who receive them are meant to serve God and not the gifts themselves. Even a gift such as long-awaited Isaac, the son who was born to a man who waited 100 years to have a son, even this gift does not replace the call to serve God first and foremost. It seems such a hard word here, unbelievably hard, which is why many do not believe it. But sometimes artists are able to help us see more clearly when theologians and scholars cannot.

One of the many biblical stories to which the 17th century artist Rembrandt was drawn was the sacrifice of Isaac. All the elements would challenge the imagination of any artist: the terrifying command of God to Abraham to sacrifice his own son as a burnt offering, the last-minute reprieve in the form of a ram, the hand of Abraham raising a knife over his only son. During his lifetime Rembrandt depicted this story several times, and it is revealing to mark the difference between the way he portrayed the story as a young man and the way he presented it in his old age. The young Rembrandt rendered the story with dramatic intensity. Abraham has Isaac on the altar, the boy’s head pulled back and the flesh of his neck exposed and vulnerable. The knife is drawn, and Abraham’s muscular arm is prepared to strike. Abraham is a man who is confident that he knows God’s will and is prepared to do it. The angel who intercedes has to muscle the knife away from Abraham.

When he was older, however, Rembrandt returned to this story as a subject for a painting. This time, though, he painted a sadness in the countenance of Abraham as he prepared to do what he believed God had instructed him to do. He covered Isaac’s eyes so that the boy would not see what was about to happen. His arm was not flexed with determination but limp with reluctance. Abraham’s face is not fixed with fierce zeal but instead softened with grateful relief as the angel simply touches his arm gently and the knife is depicted as immediately falling away. Rembrandt had learned over the years that what we fervently believe in the heat of the moment that God demands does not always, in the end, turn out to be God’s will at all. A Jewish saying has it that the proof of a true prophet is that when he prophesies doom upon the people he prays like mad that he is wrong.1

Recent years have been rough ones for children whose parents have a religious vision, or at least a vision of life without their children. Who can forget Andrea Yates who drowned all five of her children in Houston, Texas several years ago. Trouble for children came closer to home for me at the time when former Jehovah’s Witness Christian Longo killed his wife and children on the Oregon coast and then tried to hide their bodies in the bay. There aren’t many days that go by without such accounts in the newspapers. The stories have become almost common.

These were and continue to be very disturbing stories, tragic stories, but, unfortunately, not all that remarkable. Sometimes in these cases, there is an element of religious vision, the murdering parent claiming that God directed them to do what they did, as in the case of Andrea Yates, who testified that she killed her children out of fear that if she let them live they would go to hell. What reason God gives for asking such things of people they often do not say, they just respond to some direction they believe they have received.

The world is filled with kooks and thugs who take shots at public figures or fly airplanes into buildings or plot the destruction of thousands of anonymous lives for any number of reasons, often claiming they are following some self-perceived divine command, unconfirmed by others. But the face-to-face slaughter of innocent children is probably one crime for which there is more outrage than any other.

And yet, for all our revulsion at such stories, we have right under our noses a story of such an attempted case of child violence in the Bible. It has troubled readers for centuries, Jews, Christians and Muslims, everyone from Augustine to Kafka to Kierkegaard to Karl Barth. Knowing the story ahead of time, readers and hearers of the story know from the beginning that God was merely testing Abraham, seeing if he loved the gift of his son more than he loved obeying God. But while we are privileged to know the outcome ahead of time, it’s likely that Abraham didn’t, Isaac clearly didn’t.

Novelist Frederick Buechner said, in a wry understatement, “From that day on Abraham’s relationship with Isaac was never close.”2 Small wonder. But I have come to differ with that conclusion. To be sure, the relationship was forever changed, resting from that point on absolutely and completely on God’s promise. Which is another way of saying that the relationship between Abraham and Isaac from that point on rested where all relationships should rest: in God’s benevolence and promise. Any promise of God is a gift, a pure gift. The scene of Abraham and his son, poised on the edge of an unspeakable barbarity, represents a sort of divine madness which is never totally separated from a throw-your-children-off-the-bridge kind of madness. The test for Abraham was whether he trusted the promise of God for its own sake, or only because of the gift. If the gift were removed, would the trust depart as well? Abraham proved that it would not.

The meanings of this disturbing passage are difficult, but they are not beyond our ability to understand them.

Abraham’s trial demonstrates that God’s promise to us, in whatever form, lies outside our control, that’s the bad news ... but well within God’s control, that’s the good news. We also discover that understanding God’s promise, or even believing it, is impossible apart from a radical kind of obedience which may be beyond what we are willing to give to God.

The promise of God is a promise available to those willing to endure anything in order to be faithful to that promise. This is where Abraham differed from the mad or calculatingly sociopathic people who kill their children. They have it turned around the wrong way. Abraham was willing to suffer anything for the sake of the promise of God, while deranged and misguided folks are mainly attempting to relieve their own psychic suffering by throwing away the very promise that lived in their children. Abraham – and, when you think about it, Isaac too – acted in faith. The murderous ones act either in fear or calculation.

When Isaac asked his father, “Where is the lamb for the sacrifice?” though God had provided the ram, he had to wait along with the rest of humanity for several hundred years for the ultimate answer, when John the Baptist, standing with two of his disciples, pointed out Jesus and said, “Behold! the Lamb of God!”3 God is a providing God, though we must love God more than we love his provision. That is the hardest thing. To love God more than we love his manna, his provided ram.

As we look to God’s promises in our own lives, we realize that no promise is without its danger, even suffering for the sake of the promise. And yet God’s promise is the light for our eyes of faith. For God’s ultimate promise is the gift of himself in Jesus Christ.

____________________________________________

1 Thanks to Tom Long for steering me to observations about Rembrandt’s work in Journal for Preachers , Easter 2001, pp. 33-40.
2 Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who's Who, by Frederick Buechner, Harper & Row, 1979.
3 John 1:36

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Dead or Alive

Dead or Alive

© copyright 2008 Robert J. Elder

Romans 6:1b-11

June 22, 2008

Any of you who found yourselves seated near the front when I have conducted a service of baptism here may have noticed that I believe in the liberal use of water to make baptism an observable act of the church. If we are going to carry physical elements in here — water, bread, wine — then I believe we should take advantage of the symbolism they bring by making them as visible as possible. It is the reason we use a whole loaf of bread to break at communion and pass around, the reason we pour out the wine in order to hear it was well as taste it. So I believe in using lots of water in baptism.

A couple of years ago, after I had given one youngster in my confirmation class a good sloshing, someone said to me on their way out of the church, “Too bad you spilled that water during the service, but thank goodness it doesn’t stain the carpet, so no harm was done.” I should probably have responded – especially in light of what Paul has to say in Romans 6 – that it was not a spill, not an accident; when I slosh water during baptism, we are – all of us together – engaged in an act that, while it is a happy celebration, is also very serious, and very intentional.

In our culture, many of us have grown up with some curious and even non-biblical ideas about what baptism is. I have sometimes heard it referred to by Presbyterians as “christening,” which, while I would never say that is an unacceptable term, I would share with you that that word has mostly to do with naming, which is why we use it when we christen or name ships, and why I prefer to say we baptize believers and their children.

One writer, commenting on the subject of baptism, said that it is a sacrament which demands enough water to die in.1 While it is said that people have died in an inch of water, most of us would agree that enough water to die in would demand a significant amount. Why enough to die in particularly? Because Paul has spoken of our baptism in Christ, saying, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” Have you ever thought of baptism, that sweet sacrament we celebrate so often with infants as well as youth and adults, in quite this way, as an initiation of sorts into the death of Jesus?

Culturally, baptism is often conceived as a sweet, sentimental sort of action, while the New Testament sees it as nothing of the sort. Someone once said that the knowledge of Christ imparted through baptism is the bath house variety, it is something almost too uncouth to bring up at the dinner table, because situations demanding polished social manners cannot bear too much talk of earthly things. In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, on being informed that her two grown nephews were soon to be baptized, the noble auntie objected that such a thing must be regarded as gross and irreligious. If the bath house Christ, with sloshing pales of water down in the front of our otherwise orderly and tidy sanctuary, leaves us uncomfortable, then it could just be that that is precisely what it should do. Remember that Jesus himself had a rather consistently unsettling effect on most of his contemporaries.

So baptism, in the way Paul speaks of it here, is not so much a christening, that is, not a naming, and certainly not a modest “dampening” with a thimble full of water, not a sweet little entitlement of childhood. One other thing it clearly is not. It is not exclusively an event of the distant past. For many of us, our own baptism may be an unremembered act, performed on our behalf long before we were of an age to have any idea what was happening, by an adult who then presented our parents with what may now be a dusty certificate lying all but forgotten in the bottom of a remote drawer in a neglected cabinet somewhere. Others of us, who may have been baptized after reaching what is commonly referred to as “the age of reason,” if there could possibly ever be such a thing, may remember their baptism as a significant moment in their lives, but one that is in the past, set now among dozens of others of life’s significant moments. But this passage from Romans helps us see that baptism is a life long calling. To paraphrase Martin Luther, baptism is a once-and-for-all sacrament that takes your whole life to finish.

I have often thought that churches in other traditions have a good idea in placing water at entry points into the sanctuary. That way, every time a worshiper enters the sanctuary, he or she is immediately reminded of the fact that their baptism still stands, that they are in the midst of the household of faith that is drawn together around the baptismal bowl. On the other hand, other traditions have a good idea with their immersion tanks built right into the sanctuary. In such places there can be no mistake that baptism can require enough water to drown in.

One pastor friend of mine has settled on a method for helping members of his congregation recall their own baptism whenever the sacrament is celebrated. After the person is baptized, the congregation sings a hymn while he walks up and down the aisle of the church, dipping his hand into the bowl and flinging a light spray of water over the worshipers. The reaction of the unsuspecting at this moment is amazing to behold. Some duck for cover, some worry about the pages of their hymnal but most see the sense of it. This gives the sacrament a sense of constant presence among the people. The baptismal font in my previous congregation was given to the church in 1909 by the Steusloff family in memory of Johanna, almost 100 years ago. It was so long ago, no one remembers her or her family in the church today. No one, that is, except for the One who is the Lord of baptism. I always enjoyed reflecting on a vision of all the thousands of people presented at that font from that time to this, all lined up at that font in a line that would stretch out the door and down the street and around the block, people who had been received – one by one – as precious subjects of God’s love right at that very font. The thought reminds me of the presence of the great cloud of witnesses described in the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament.

Some in our world think it strange that we keep a cross and a baptismal font in the sanctuary, but Paul shows us that cross and baptism are intimately related. Why should baptism demand enough water to drown in? To reveal what Paul said to us: “...we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”

Death to the old, giving life for the new. Paul seems to have a curious view of death. We tend to think of it as a finality, an end of the road. But Paul carries around the idea that death leads to something else, and not just a life after a physical death. Paul suggests that we go through deaths in this life, that we might be more alive, still in this life. When we baptize sweet little babies on a Sunday morning, who among us is led to thoughts of death? But in this way the Bible is realistic about life in ways that our own culture seems not to be. In a pessimistic moment, we acknowledge that all of us are born to die. Our culture would want to deny that, want to see baptism only as a sweet, quaint little rite of passage, a harmless little ritual.

The symbolism of death with Christ suggests that with him we die to so much that the world holds dear because we want to be in touch and in line with what Christ holds dear. So we die to the world that we may live to Christ.

I took part in home-building missions in Mexico for ten days every summer for almost 15 years. The world might wonder why anyone would set aside their own life for ten days of discomfort sleeping on the hard ground, with days of hard labor. But the body of Christ knows that in attending to the needs of others, and especially of the poor, we attend to that which is close to the very heart of God. We die to this tiny portion of our lives that we may live to Christ. I remembered that death to our own lives one summer when we baptized one of our church’s beautiful young people there in Mexico.

Once, during the turbulent course of the Viet Nam war, a college chaplain I know was conversing with a group of students on campus when one, thinking of that war, said, “There is nothing in the world that is worth dying for.” To that, the chaplain replied, “Well then, since we all must die, that will mean that you will one day be confronted by the absolute necessity of dying for nothing.”

It was a hard word but an honest one. If the only good any of us ever did in the world was to spend a few weekends building a Habitat house, or spending a few summer days in Mexico trying to help lift up some of those who are down-trodden, or to encourage through financial gifts or prayer those who are more able than we are to face the rigors of mission work in far-off places as well as near, if the only good any of us ever did was something like this, then ever after it could never be said of us that we had given our lives for nothing. Today we might do well to remember people in our own Presbyterian Church USA who give their lives for work in Christ’s name in Asia, South America, Africa, on reservations with Native Americans and in remote Amazon jungles. We celebrate them not just because they doo good and helpful work. We celebrate because these missions represent a baptismal reality in the church in which people literally die to their own lives for a time that they might live to the mission and ministry of Christ.

Praise be to God then who gives us his work to do in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

____________________
1. Aidan Kavanaugh: The Shape of Baptism: The Rite of Christina Initiaton, Liturgical Press, 1991, Page 179.

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Get Up and Follow

As Jesus was walking along,
he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth;
and he said to him, “Follow me.”
And he got up and followed him.

This is the sort of title that can easily be misread in the bulletin: “Get Up and Follow Pastor Elder,” it could be read. Or, “Get Up and Follow, Pastor Elder...” The second rendition, with the added comma, is better, more in line with our text for today too.

A pastor’s call, every believer’s call, is to help people learn to follow Jesus. All people, every sort of person. It is part of a pastor’s job to help believers discover that they have a calling to the faith, that it’s not just a matter of personal choice or preference like a supermarket spirituality, but rather that Jesus calls, and we respond. He is the initiator and we are the ones he moves. At least that is the way it is supposed to be.

One of the most frequent questions asked of every pastor usually has to do with our sense of calling. I can stand up here and tell you that every believer has a calling, and I believe it is true, but there exists within lots of people a sort of suspicion that pastors receive a special sense of call, a kind of high-octane summons from God. “How did you know you were called to be a minister?” people will ask, or “How did you decide to become a pastor?” How did we begin singing “Standing on the Promises,” when before we had simply been sitting on the premises?

The fact is, for many pastors, decision had little to do with it. For most of us, there has been some sort of resistance, some doubt, some question, often a question which follows us right into our ministries: “Is this what I am really supposed to be doing with my life?” And despite some appearances, for most there has been no opening of the heavens, always there remains some question, some curiosity about our own call to ministry. I suspect the same is true for most believers. It is easy for us to envy people who have what Barbara Brown Taylor once called “a spectacular sense of call.”1 She wrote,

“I once had a job that involved reading applications for admission to a Methodist seminary. One of the questions on the standard form was, ‘Why are you applying to this school of theology?’ The answers were often fantastic, many of them involving car wrecks in which the applicant’s narrow escape resulted in a call to preach...”

That would be a report of a dramatic call to ministry, like Paul’s famous blinding light when he was on his way to Damascus to persecute the Christian community there. Dr. Taylor recalls once interviewing a man who was in prison for an adolescent incident in which he was involved in an armed robbery. He became a believer while in prison and had served enough of his sentence without incident and with good behavior that when he informed his parole board of his desire to pursue a call to ministry in the church, they had told him if he was accepted as a candidate for ministry, they would let him out. During his interview with the application committee, he pulled up his shirt to show his inquirers where a bullet had gone in his stomach and out his back. “That was my burning bush,” he told them. Dr. Taylor goes on,

“Sometimes I think that those spectacular call stories in the Bible do more harm than good. At the very least, I suppose, they are good reminders that the call of God tends to take you apart before it puts you back together again, but they also set the bar on divine calling so high that most people walk around feeling short...If you walk into the average Christian church to explore your purpose, chances are that you will come out with an invitation to...volunteer at the soup kitchen on Tuesdays. It is almost enough to make you envy the guy with the bullet hole.”

This is one reason I like the story of Matthew’s call to ministry so much. Unlike Paul’s story, complete with a voice from heaven and a blinding light, tantamount to a bullet hole in the belly, Matthew’s call is as simple and straightforward as can be imagined: “As Jesus was walking along,” the gospel says, “he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.”

Ta da! That’s it. Jesus called, Matthew followed. Simplicity itself. The questions Matthew may have had, any self-doubts and worries apparently were to be addressed later, if at all. The main issue is following when called.

Another reason I like the story of Matthew’s call has to do with the person Matthew was and what he represented to those around him. Matthew was what one scholar called a “prototype sinner.” Tax collectors in Jesus’ day were people who were motivated by pure self-interest. They were equated with sinfulness in the way that some say when you looked up the word in a dictionary, you’d see their picture as an illustration. The way “byzantine” has come to mean “complicated,” and “Dickensian” refers to a dark time of social injustice, “tax collector” in Jesus’ day meant really really bad sinner.

This suggests there may more to getting up and following Jesus than just getting up. There is more to our call to follow him than good intentions poorly wrought. And there is certainly more to this call business than being good people, as the story of Matthew’s call amply demonstrates. Matthew didn’t start out as a good person destined for ministry. Jesus called Matthew, and Matthew rose up and followed. That was the test for discipleship, for calling, the getting up and following. Any other necessary qualifications could apparently be added later.

That Jesus called fishermen to be his disciples and to share his work sounds lovely and rural and somehow particularly satisfying in a homespun way. Fishermen like Peter and Andrew were, after all, industrious, hardworking, productive members of their community. Easy enough to agree with Jesus’ decision to call them. But tax collectors? It’s as if Jesus chose to include in his class of disciples Mike Tyson, or the executives of Enron who were willing to sacrifice the welfare and savings of thousands to line their own pockets. The hard truth is that it’s true, Jesus does call such people. But not just such people. Jesus calls all sorts of people, and our names are on his list side by side with them, yours and mine.

It has been said that people do not volunteer to be disciples, they are called to that work. A church is not an association of volunteers, it is a congregation of people who have been called by Christ. In the gospels Jesus was known to reject people who supposed they could become disciples simply by means of their own decision;2 likewise, in our passage today Jesus calls one who would have been rejected by others.3 Rejecting the chosen, choosing the rejected. There is certainly good news for someone hidden in such a gospel story about Jesus. It must have been good news for Matthew and other sinners. He collected a house full of other tax gatherers and assorted sinners to listen to the words of the master.

I think the combination of the story of Matthew’s call with the account of the healings of the little girl and the hemorrhaging woman is insightful for this reason: Jesus responded to his critics that “those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” Yet the hard truth is, no one is well. No one. Those who believe they are sinless thereby shield themselves from the grace of Jesus.

How did it feel to be a prototype sinner, like Matthew, despised one day, a disciple the next? How does it feel for any of us, really, to carry the name of Jesus? Probably for Matthew, as for the rest of the disciples, as for us, there is a feeling of being unequal to the task of representing Christ to the world. And still we are called.

Some of you may be familiar with the operas of the great composer, Giacomo Puccini, who wrote such works as Madam Butterfly, and La Bohème. While suffering with cancer he was working on his opera Turandot, which he continued to write at a clinic to which he had been sent in Brussels. Turandot proved to be his final, though still unfinished, work. It is said that he realized he was not going to be able to complete it and asked his students to finish it for him. He left many pages of drafts for a duet and the last scenes of the opera. The completion of the project finally was left to one of Puccini’s students, Franco Alfano, who completed the opera six months after the maestro’s death.

Soon after Puccini died in 1924, the opera opened at the La Scala Opera House in Milan. It was conducted by another of his students, his son-in-law Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini conducted the opera until he reached the point where Puccini's work had remained incomplete at his death. Toscanini stopped the orchestra and singers and put down his baton. He faced the audience and announced, “Thus far the master wrote. Then he died.”4 After a pause, he said, “But his disciples continue his work.” He raised his baton and finished the opera, which was greeted with thunderous applause.

I suppose that disciples of all times know what this sort of story means. Anyone who has ever had a mentor, a figure to whom they have looked for guidance knows the feeling of inadequacy in their presence. I recall preaching in my church once when an invited guest speaker for a renewal event at the church — one of my former seminary professors, a brilliant man who electrified students in the lecture hall at Princeton Seminary — was sitting in the pews, on one side, about three rows from the back. It was nerve-wracking, I can tell you. What a challenge it is to carry on the call to ministry in front of your master! Even so, we recall with Matthew’s story today that Jesus persistently calls disciples, all of whom are made whole through their love of that man, all of whom labor to continue his work.

And it has been this way for those who follow him ever since.

_________________________
1 “True Purpose,” by Barbara Brown Taylor, in Christian Century, February 21, 2001, p. 30.
2 Matthew 8:18-20.
3 New Interpreter’s Bible VIII, Matthew Boring, Abingdon, 1995, p. 235.
4 Source: http://geocities.com/airepuccini

Sunday, June 1, 2008

The Ways of God, and Some Other Ways

© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder

Mountain View Presbyterian Church
Ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time
June 1, 2008
Mark 2:23-3:6

The sabbath was made for humanity,
and not humanity for the sabbath;
so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.

A friend of mine, a Christian pastor, told me about an everyday sort of experience with his next door neighbor, a faithful, kosher-observant conservative Jew. My friend is what many would call — in as kindly a way as possible — mechanically-impaired. Buy him all the books about how things work that you want, he just doesn’t get it. So he generally leaves the mechanical things of life to the experts: he tries always to drive a late-model car so he won’t have to worry about mechanical breakdowns, he calls in the plumbers or electricians whenever there is a need and never tries to manage such “handyman” things himself. I don’t think he ever even watched Home Improvement or This Old House.

Early one Saturday morning, my friend’s Jewish neighbor peered out and saw him struggling with a ladder to wash the upstairs windows on their two-story home. The neighbor — whose windows were of the same make — called out to him, “Why don’t you do that from the inside?” These were the sort of windows which, by flipping a lever, you can pull into the house for easy cleaning. “I can’t figure it out,” my friend responded, apparently too proud to admit he was so mechanically klutzy he even needed to hire out this simple task.

The Jewish neighbor, resting at home on Saturday, his religious Sabbath, called out again, “I could come over tomorrow and show you. What would be a good time?”

“You know what I do tomorrow!?” my pastor friend responded. There is little time for washing windows on a Sunday for most pastors!

“Hmmm,” said the observant Jewish next-door neighbor, perhaps recalling for whom God created the Sabbath in the first place, “wait there a minute and I’ll be over.”

Jesus said that the Sabbath was made for humanity and not humanity for the Sabbath. Most of us, with our exceptionally-relaxed, early twenty-first century understanding of the Sabbath as a day when we might choose to go to church for an hour or so in the morning, and then spend the rest of the day gardening, or catching up on work at the office, or doing a thousand other things, most of us have lost sight of the strict nature of Sabbath regulations for observant Jews. Whether he would have put it this way or not, my friend’s Jewish neighbor was taking to heart Jesus’ own words in such a way as to demonstrate that he knew what it means that God established the Sabbath for the welfare and happiness of humanity, and not the other way around.

In our time-driven culture, where we find too little time for working, sleeping, nurturing relationships, playing, exercising, cleaning the house, entertaining friends, meeting social obligations, in this culture there is an increasing longing for what Jews and Christians call Sabbath, even though many do not know what name to put on it.

The command to observe the Sabbath appears in the Ten Commandments, which themselves appear in two places in the Old Testament: Exodus 19 and Deuteronomy 5.1 In Exodus, the reason given for keeping to a day of rest after six days of labor is that it follows the pattern God set when creating the world, working six days, resting on the seventh. We are reminded by our own Sabbath rest that we are made in the very image of our Creator. In Deuteronomy, the reason given for Sabbath rest is that the Jews were freed slaves. Slaves cannot take a day off from labor. Free people can. No wonder, when extra hours have to be spent at our jobs, we often refer to it almost instinctively by saying, “I’ve been slaving at work for over a week!” To live without Sabbath rest is like slavery!

Now, in Jesus’ world as well as ours, while the Sabbath was defined by many things, the one thing it was not to be was a day for work. Defining what is meant by work has provided full-time employment for religious authorities through the centuries, but about the general principle there is agreement. A day of rest from work provides a weekly reminder that, in the end, it is not human effort that meets the needs of the world, but the providing love of God.

We have probably all heard too many sermons on Jesus’ strong words to the Pharisees concerning Sabbath observance which say something to the effect that the Jews of his day were not much more than a bunch of legalists who missed the spirit of the Sabbath commandment. Perhaps our too-eager embrace of this view has lead to our slovenly Sabbath practice as Christians, where a Sunday appears to be little more than another “day off” during a weekend, which may or may not be punctuated by a short worship service. True Sabbath observance, at its best, has been said to “open a space for God”2 in the middle of the times of our lives.

So what was Jesus’ problem? Why did he get into entanglements with the Pharisees over Sabbath observance? Jesus asked whether it was lawful to do good on the Sabbath, and the silence of his opponents gave him leave to let his actions give the answer. Sabbath is intended for the goodness of humanity. But any time we read a passage of scripture and easily find ourselves immediately on Jesus’ side, we have probably not read the passage correctly, or at least not fully.

Imagine Israel as an occupied country. The Romans had succeeded in subduing many other countries and cultures, and they fully intended to do the same with Israel. It was not just brute force that accomplished this, though Lord knows there was plenty of that. They had somehow understood the importance of cultural transformation. Everyone was required to honor the emperor, subtly substituting his empire-wide image on coins, flags, and statuary for the social cohesiveness formerly provided by local religious customs and practices. Countries all around the former Roman Empire speak versions of Latin to this day: French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, all testimony to the subversive cultural success of Roman Empire building. No wonder the rabbis were adamant about the provisions of the law of Israel. To retain their uniqueness as a people tremendous effort was required to resist pressures to conform. And among their distinctive traits was the observance of Sabbath every 7th day. To give that up would be to disappear into the generic population of Roman-dominated Mediterranean peoples of the 1st century. Then along came this itinerant preacher, Jesus from Galilee, who appeared to teach that Sabbath observance was an option rather than a requirement of their faith. The opposition Jesus encountered is more understandable when we realize all this.

Yet we also need to remember what Jesus was really doing through his actions on the Sabbath. He was not saying that the Sabbath is irrelevant or even optional. He was simply issuing a reminder that God is Lord even of a religious tradition as sacred as the Sabbath. Our commitment to religious observances concerning God should never overshadow our acknowledgement that God is Lord even of our religious observances.

It is the way of God to be gracious, to work and then provide for rest, to free those who are bound. Our world is designed with such graciousness in mind. Being weak creatures, we are in need of frequent reminders about this. One day in seven is not a bad proportion for reminding us about the grace of God. But we can turn such reminders into a sort of substitute god, forgetting the graciousness of the One who gave them. For this reason, Jesus came not to change the law, but to remind us of the compassionate nature of the God whose law helps keep us gracious.

Jesus did not do away with Sabbath observance. He did not say that everyone is now free to take their Sabbath when and where and in whatever fashion they like, to follow the individualistic approach to faith expression which is one of the chief evils of our lives in the church today. Communion, which we celebrate today, reminds us that our faith is communal, something we do together in community. No, the point becomes clear that Jesus, when asked about what is lawful declared that what is lawful is not nearly so important a question as what is merciful, what is gracious, and, above all, what points to the One who is Lord even over the Sabbath itself.

In our religious obligations we are not free to enslave or starve people in order to maintain some abstract principle of law. When the contest comes to a choice between compassion, food for the hungry, freedom for the captive on the one hand, and an abstract principle on the other, it is compassion, freedom and care which are most clearly the ways of God. Any other way is just some course other than the way of the One who is Lord even of the Sabbath.

Through Jesus’ words today, we are reminded of this God who provides all we need and more. We are reminded of a whole day each week given to us for freedom from work — a tithe of a 7th of our time — by which we celebrate the gift of life itself, given back to God, it’s true possessor. This is really good news we may rely on.

© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 I am indebted to Dorothy Bass' article, “Keeping Sabbath: Reviving a Christian Practice,” Christian Century, Jan 1-8, 1997, p. 13 for ideas in this paragraph.
2 Ibid., p. 14

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Consider the Lilies

Luke 12:22-31

Psalm 121
May 25, 2008
© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder

Consider the lilies, how they grow:
they neither toil nor spin;
yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory
was not clothed like one of these.
But if God so clothes the grass of the field,
which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven,
how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith!

Experts in New Testament Greek agree, of all the gospel writers, Luke had the most fluid Greek writing style, suggesting a background of education and possibly a relatively high social standing. Like Paul, Luke was probably made constantly aware that the church for which he spoke had a high proportion of people who could no more write Greek than we could, who possessed very little material wealth, who came from backgrounds of poverty and oppression. Possibly through painful encounters with the implications of living the gospel, Luke became aware that it was not his church brethren that needed to learn from his highborn ways as much as it was he who needed to learn from them – even in the midst of their lack of wealth and what we today would call social security. The ancient world was thoroughly unacquainted with things like retirement plans, and life for the vast majority of people, on a material level, could be characterized as a rather desperate hold on what little material wealth they had.

With that kind of poverty in mind – the sort most of us can only imagine from fleeting images we may chance to see on the TV screen – we can learn with Luke from our brothers and sisters in the faith who live full lives in many places around the world, possessing only the tiniest fraction of the kind of material wealth we know. Luke’s gospel message, like ours, is spoken not to a poverty-stricken people in order to keep them in their place, but to a sophisticated world of people, filled with a kind of anxiety that rooms full of material goods can never ease. Knowing that, we may know how Luke understood Jesus’ words when he heard them, and why he passed them on.

We know that these words from the lips of Jesus are not about several things: They are not a reasoned argument against a struggle for self-sufficiency; They do not promote a passive do-nothing attitude in the face of adversity; They do not advocate fatalistic resignation; Most of all, they are not a club which wealthy people can use to beat poor folks over the head in order to keep them in their place. Rather, this passage is more like that most dreaded of examination questions from our school days: the “forced choice” question. Jesus the teacher would want to ask us to choose our ultimate loyalty between God and mammon, between a single-minded trust and an anxious distrust, and then make a case for our choice.

This passage is mostly about things that can be trusted, and serves as an encouragement to us to behave as if we believed these words were so.

Anyone who places even partial trust in material things – social position, personal achievement, earned run averages, won-loss records, Wall Street trends, Social Security, a ten-year-old automobile for midnight rides on I-15, their share of Daddy’s estate – knows the meaning of the word anxiety. It’s not that we can avoid involvement with material things, Social Security, or – many of us – ten year-old automobiles, any more than baseball players can avoid earned-run averages or Wall Street players can avoid the Dow Jones.

These words are not a hymn to resignation. They are an encouragement to remember what comes first. Seek first the kingdom of God. Things can be worried about at their own level of importance. To be a part of God’s kingdom puts some of life’s experiences in perspective, it is to know first of all that we are precious in God’s eyes.

Now that may sound like a pulpit cliché: “we are precious in God’s eyes.” But I doubt it sounds as much like one on a Memorial Day weekend as on some ordinary weekend. Jesus took great pains to let us know that it is so. He was aware that we possess a built-in reluctance to see it is so. Perhaps our reluctance has to do with a merit pay scale view of life. Any mother’s child knows that in this world we don’t get by on other peoples’ good will. What we receive is what we have earned. We may utter pious platitudes about believing in the essential goodness of people, but our experience often gives the lie to that sentiment.

From school days through retirement, modern life is a constant program of performance evaluation. High School transcripts, college transcripts and test scores provide means of entry into employment or professional school. And after all that, following the first few years in a career, job performance begins to outweigh records of academic achievement. Every major company has performance review for employees. Businesses stand or fall on their record of performance. One must earn the trust of creditors before securing a loan, and that respect comes mainly through means of good past performance on loans and payment schedules. How many times have we heard about some outstanding citizen who is said to have “earned the respect and admiration of his fellow citizens”?

Evaluation – measuring up – is part of life, as American as apple pie. We are so accustomed to the idea that everyone gets what they deserve that it is no wonder we are surprised when someone challenges that wisdom. In some ways, Jesus might as well have been speaking a foreign language when he uttered those words about anxiety over the material things of life. What else is there to get quite as anxious about? To our desperate daily chase after the security of material possessions, Jesus uttered a quiet and welcome word of grace.

Birds of the air do not plow fields or plant corn, yet our heavenly Father feeds them. The lilies of the field never had a cumulative grade point average of 3.9, but God sees to it that their clothing is more glorious than anything Paris Hilton has in her closet. If this is so, if mere birds and grass are subjects of God’s great concern, how much more the pride of his Creation, the people whom he has chosen to call his own?

Jesus took our normal expectations and turned them upside down. We might not like a merit payscale, but at least it’s familiar. We know how to act when someone asks us for two or three references. But the idea that God’s care is available to everyone without cost flies in the face of so much of what we spend our lives doing.

Our perspective may be like the story of the farmer and his pious pastor. The preacher looked at his beautifully cultivated field and exclaimed, “What you and God have accomplished!” The farmer replied, “You should have seen it when only God was working this field!”

How like us all that comment is: “I have worked for what I have. What part has God played in bringing home the weekly paycheck?” Yet we consistently miss the point if we think our lives are about our own hard work, or overeating, or a three-day weekend, or even a time to be with family.

Our word from Luke is a word of trust as the best remedy for anxiety.

It’s interesting that our money declares for all the world to see, “In God We Trust”... but it’s the US Treasury Department, not God, that puts its good faith behind our currency. One joker said, “In God we trust: all others pay cash.” Even so, even in its secular, compromised sort of way, that simple declaration on coins and folding money is a way of admitting the limited sort of assurance that money can provide when we start throwing around words like trust.

Those who have lost everything and survived to tell about it generally mention trust in something beyond the material realm in the story of their survival. Psalm 121 is generally loved for the wrong reason. You remember it, it begins with an interrogative statement:

I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From whence does my help come?

It is not – and this is important – a declarative statement:

I lift up my eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help.

That is because our help does not, ultimately, come from hills or dales or big bank accounts or even lean ones. Our help does not come from beautiful mountain settings, nor lush golf course greens, nor libraries full of books, nor the latest computer system, nor safety deposit boxes filled with securities. No, Luke and the Psalmist with him want to remind us – since we are so prone to forget it – our “help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” That trust in God is just about the only trust worthy of the name. Nothing less will do. Not for long.

I’ll close today with some thoughtful words from an old hymn text by William Cowper1 – a paraphrase of Luke and the prophet Habakkuk2:

[Tomorrow] can bring with it nothing
But God will bear us through;
Who gives the lilies clothing
Will clothe the people too:
Beneath the spreading heavens
No creature but is fed;
And God who feeds the ravens
Will give his children bread.

And just in case lean times threatened the understanding of this hymn, he continued:

Though vine nor fig tree neither
Their wonted fruit shall bear,
Though all the field should wither,
Nor flocks nor herds be there;
Yet God the same abiding,
His praise shall tune my voice,
For while in Him confiding
I cannot but rejoice.

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1 “Joy and Peace in Believing,” #48, Olney Hymns, Glasgow: William Collins & Co., Printers, 1843, p. 332.
2 Habakkuk 3:17-18.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Shining Lights and Dim Bulbs

Shining Lights and Dim Bulbs
Matthew 5:14-16

A Sermon for the Class of 2008
Baccalaureate Service
Schreiner University, Kerrville, Texas

You are the light of the world.
A city built on a hill cannot be hid.
No one after lighting a lamp puts it
under the bushel basket,
but on the lampstand,
and it gives light to all in the house.
In the same way, let your light shine before others,
so that they may see your good works
and give glory to your Father in heaven.

We all know what a special day this is on which we are gathered, and I just want to pay homage to it by wishing you an early Happy Mother’s Day! Just in case any of you graduating scholars thought this weekend was intended to be entirely about you, I might suggest, if your mom has been able to be here to celebrate this weekend with you, that you take at least a moment today or tomorrow to slip out to a flower shop or candy store. Then you really will be the light of the world - of her world anyway.

The impact behind Jesus’ words to his disciples in Matthew 5 reinforces a theme declaring that whatever else may be true about our lives of discipleship, it is true that our lives are not all about us. This is a pretty good word to hear from him, a counterpoint, I suspect, on a day that is really and rightfully pretty much given over to being about you, as you graduate from Schreiner.

When Jesus spoke the words about being the light of the world, he was speaking to people who lived in tiny one-room homes, where the only source of light after sunset was typically a small oil lamp, made from fired clay, with a single flame, about the size of a small candle flame. It would have been set on a lampstand in the middle of the room to give its little light to the entire house. We can imagine how small a light it would give, a single flame in the midst of total darkness. But imagine how futile it would be, as Jesus said, to light such a lamp, and then hide it under a basket. Why would anyone do such a foolish thing? One might as well not light the lamp at all!

Now his point, and mine today, is that our lives may be compared to those oil lamps. My light is not meant for me alone. Nor is yours. Your light - and your life - are meant to be set on a lampstand to give light to others as well as yourself. It sounds simple enough, but it is a lesson our culture has great difficulty learning. I hope your generation learns it better than mine has.

Let your light shine before others. Ours is not a time that has been entirely kind to the idea of the calling of individuals to serve the greater good of the community, though I think your generation may have a better recognition of this communitarian spirit than mine has. But in every generation there is always a temptation to turn away from the idea of service to the community and turn inward.

When Jesus said “You are the light of the world,” he used the plural “you,” as in “all of you are the light of the world.” Here in Texas, the plural form of you still lives in our typically colloquial southern term, “y’all.” The word in Matthew 5 is not addressed to individuals, but to the group that had gathered to listen to Jesus’ sermon. “Y’all are the light of the world,” he said. He might even have said, “All y’all.” A disciple whose light and witness are entirely a personal matter is not a disciple by the measure of these words of Matthew 5.

Jesus phrased his affirmation of us, “You all are the light of the world,” in the present tense. Believers are just what we are. Light is light. A candle doesn’t have to go to light school to learn how to do it. It is as much in the nature of our being as believers to love one another and be light for each other as it is in the nature of light to be bright. It can’t be anything else.

Jesus also said “You are the salt of the earth.” Both salt and light have in common that their form and function are the same. This isn’t true of very many things. A kitchen table can serve as a desk for homework or a stool to stand on and change a light bulb. But salt and light stop being what they are if they do anything different. As Jesus observed, if salt stops tasting like salt, functioning chemically as salt, it stops being salt. If light behaves any differently it stops being light. And if we turn our backs on each other, turn inward, give up on the mutual obligations we all share in building a society, then we have stopped being light, salt, stopped being what we were and have become something else altogether.

And why do we do this, why are we called to be salt of the earth, light of the world, and moreover, why do we respond?

It’s because of “A.M.D.G.”1 We let our lights shine before others because of A.M.D.G. Those four letters were scrawled across the top of every one of J.S. Bach’s music manuscripts. They formed the personal motto of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Often, in older churches, the letters A.M.D.G. appear above or on everything from organ pipes to stained glass windows to furniture.

And A.M.D.G. circumscribes the reason that disciples do what we do, they form the purpose behind Jesus’ words to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth. A.M.D.G. helps us remember that what we do and the lives we pursue are not about us. The reason this university stands on these grounds is not to bring glory to students, administration or faculty. Schreiner is here because of A.M.D.G.

A.M.D.G. was the prime motivation in the establishment of some 62 Presbyterian Colleges and universities and 10 theological seminaries in the USA, in addition to Schreiner. The Presbyterian Church (USA) is a pretty small denomination, so that’s a lot of motivation. It was also the motivation behind Jesus’ ministry, behind every bake sale to raise money for missions, behind the work of countless teachers, preachers, engineers, physicians, lawyers, elders and deacons and others in places familiar to us and remote places where we are never likely to venture.

Jesus declares Let your light shine… but then comes “one of those Jesus stealth-zingers”2: so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. A.M.D.G., letters which appear around all sorts of human efforts in churches and schools, are an abbreviation for a Latin phrase: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam - “To the Greater Glory of God.” They serve as a reminder which human beings need far more often than we’d care to admit, that this life, this world, thousands of hospitals and schools, even this university, they are not all about us, but they are, in the end, all about the glory of God.

Let your light shine before others. In a city where I used to live there was a wonderful old family-owned camera store. Such businesses are mostly relics of the past now. The digital era of photography has pretty much put these places out of business. Still I will always remember that shop, which itself had been there for decades, had been handed down for a couple of generations in one family. The owner I knew then was a man named Keith. Keith was a one-of-a-kind individual, and I used to go into his shop all the time. I bought film there - in case any of us can remember when cameras needed film - had it developed there, shopped for photographic gadgets there, and swapped stories with Keith there because he was, not incidentally, a fine professional photographer. I remember a conversation I had with a friend who discovered that I did all my photographic shopping there, and he said to me, “Why on earth do you go there to buy film and have it developed? Cameras and supplies are cheaper at the big box store and even cheaper if you order them through the mail. Why go to Keith’s for the privilege of buying photo supplies at full list price?”

I replied, “I take my photo needs to Keith, because when you buy camera supplies there, you don’t just get stuff - which as you are so right in saying, you can get anywhere - you get Keith. And Keith is worth the price.” Keith lit his little light in that store, and then he let it shine for others to see and be guided by it.

Let your light shine before others. I pray that each of us gathered here this day will find that letting our lights shine before others so that they will see the good we do, and give glory to God, will form part of our life’s calling.

And, dear graduates, ours appears to me to be a world that could well use the light you have to bring. The task for all of us now is to pray that in today’s leave-taking you will light your lights and let them shine so that those who see your good works will give glory to God.

It is time for that, time to give glory to God, class of 2008. Your time. Light up your lights. And let them shine - in God’s good time, and in God’s good name. God bless you, and Godspeed. Amen.

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1 Thanks to Michael Lindvall for this idea, from his sermon “A.M.D.G.”, preached at Brick Presbyterian Church, New York City, 10/16/2005.
2 Ibid.

Sunday, May 4, 2008

When Called by a Panther

The panther is like a leopard,
Except it hasn't been peppered.
Should you behold a panther crouch,
Prepare to say Ouch.
Better yet, if called by a panther,
Don't anther. — Ogden Nash

Sometimes we pick up the newspaper or turn on the television news only to hear news of atrocities and murder, violence, and we may say to ourselves and others that it is shocking. But are we shocked? Most of us have become so accustomed to reports of the violent cruelty of our world that we only half listen even to the most horrible reports. Perhaps that is because each of them is invariably followed by “And now this...” after which follow ads about antacids, new cars, or fast food.

Our news is trivialized by the very media which bring it to us. Still, when tragedy or injustice strike us personally, or diminish some member of our family, then we are still capable of a state of disbelief. “How could this happen? If only I had seen it coming...”

1st Peter expresses some thoughts on the extreme social and family costs that were incurred by new Christian believers in the first century, yet he found nothing strange in fiery ordeals that overtook the people of the first churches. After all, Peter was weaned from family, career, home, and even the faith of his parents by his own emerging commitment to Christ. The letter is written from experience: “Don’t be surprised,” it says, “as though something strange were happening to you.”

Commonly, people take any touble as a sign of God’s absence, a strange and unexpected signal that God has turned his back on us. 1st Peter says, “Don’t be surprised.” If we have read the paper, seen the news, how can we be surprised at further evidence that life can be cruel?

But here 1st Peter and common wisdom part ways. Common wisdom might say we should not be surprised at the cruelties of humanity, because that’s the way human beings are. But our scripture describes the events of human experience in the world as a contest of sorts. Goodness and evil do not emerge into an otherwise neutral world. Rather, the emergence of one lays claim to moral territory previously assumed to be in thrall to the other; acts of goodness bring upon themselves reactions from those who stand to profit by cruel or bullying behavior. Moral neutrality is not an option in 1 Peter.

We can be sure that an appeal to the goodness of God does not appear in a morally neutral world, but rather exists as a challenge to those who believe they stand to lose wherever goodness stands to gain.

A distant example: if the drug warlords of Central and South America were left alone to ply their trade, we might not hear much about it except for the evil effects on drug addicted people here in the states. Yet, inevitably, judges who dare to dispense justice in those countries are murdered in the streets, prosecutors and their families are executed. The assertion of goodness never comes into a neutral world, but will inevitably be perceived as a threat to those who have organized their lives around another loyalty. “Don’t be surprised...as if something strange were happening to you...” The advice sounds strangely modern. There is nothing strange or particularly modern about suffering and evil.

1 Peter creates a telling image. He said that our faithfulness may be challenged by one who strikes with the ferocity of a roaring lion on the prowl, looking for dinner. Yet, astonishingly, verse 9 gives us this encouragement: “Resist him”!

Resist a lion? Doesn’t the very image of the prowling lion call to mind the powerlessness of the early believers, thrown to hungry beasts in the gladiatorial arena in Rome? “Better yet, if called by a panther, don’t anther.” Peter’s words may call to mind the lions’ den in the book of Daniel. “Resist!” What an instruction! And, of course, the natural question to follow is: “How?”

Here’s “what” that we have been given. 1st Peter says, “You know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering.” The power of resistance is intensified exponentially once we remember we are not in this alone, that the power of the gospel, of goodness, asserts itself around the world. No temporary, local setback will extinguish its light.

20 years ago, when Presbyterian missionary professor Ben Weir was imprisoned by Shiite militants in Lebanon,1 he reported that one of his chief comforts during dreary months of captivity was to save a bit of his weekly bread ration, and on Sundays, in his solitary cell, break and eat it while remembering that Christian brothers and sisters all over the world were doing the same, celebrating the Lord’s Supper. Knowing that others celebrate the same Lord overcomes fear, reminds us that our trials are temporary, that we may call at will on the power of One who is eternal.

1st Peter tells us that God will establish us. The Greek word used there, translated here as “established,” is the one Jesus used when he spoke about the difference between a house with a foundation built on rock and one founded on sand;2 it is the word John used when he spoke about the foundation stones of the heavenly city in Revelation;3 it is the word Paul used when he told the believers in Corinth that the call of a church planter is to lay the right foundation, namely Jesus Christ.4

What are we to do, then, when we are surrounded by lions? We are to remember the very thing on which our faith, our very lives have been built: Jesus Christ. There is no greater way to be established in our faith, to be supported, strengthened, and restored, than to be part of a mutually supportive fellowship of believers, and to find ourselves in the midst of our family of faith.

During the War of 1812 a British warship arrived in Massachusetts to send five boats full of soldiers to take an undefended town. The commander on the warship knew that their success depended on the town’s lack of preparation. As his boats drew near to land they heard a fife and drum on shore. Everyone knew that a fife and drum were used to rally a local militia. Cursing his luck, the commander called back the boats and the warship sailed away. In fact, there had been no militia, just two young daughters of the lighthouse keeper playing fife and drum. The rest of the townfolk had fled in the night. A roaring lion may look like an unbeatable adversary, but the memory of a loving fellowship can provide enough foundation to sustain us, to “establish” us in our faith.

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1 Hostage Bound, Hostage Free, by Ben Weir, Carol Weir, and Dennis Benson, © 1987, Lutterworth Press.
2 Matthew 7:25 (also Luke 6:48).
3 Revelation 21:14.
4 I Corinthians 3:10-12.