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Dr. Joe Emerson
June 28, 2009
“Times Change and So Must We”
II Corinthians 8:7-15
Now as you excel in everything–in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and in our love for you–so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking.
I do not say this as a command, but I am testing the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others. For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. And in this matter I am giving my advice: it is appropriate for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something–now finish doing it, so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it according to your means. For if the eagerness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has–not according to what one does not have. I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance.
As it is written,
‘The one who had much did not have too much,
and the one who had little did not have too little.’
The New York Times carried an article about a Texas baseball game. It was a doubleheader and the umpires in the first game had a terrible time. They were booed and they were cursed. Somebody even threw a coke bottle at them. At the beginning of the second game, nobody could find the umpires. Finally, they were found sitting up in the stands. The fans asked, “Don’t you know you need to get down and call the game?” The umpires said, “It seems that you folks can see better from up here than we can down there right next to the bases, so we decided to call the second game from here in the stands.”
I’ve discovered that you ought never to say “never.” I never intended to preach again. I put all my notes away. I used to carry this notebook to preach from. It uses 6"x9" looseleaf paper. The last time I went to purchase refills, I discovered that you can’t find them anymore. You can’t buy them or order them. I thought that must be a sign from God. But never say “never.”
Times change and so must we. That is the perspective of the old preacher who now sits in the stands. Somehow we must learn to change as a church and a people. As I was preparing this, I thought, “This sermon is for people who are not even here. You are failing the “so what” question”. Then I realized that it is only when people like you and I change, that change for the church will come from underneath. When people are finally able to say, “That just doesn’t make sense any more” and move on then our leadership will be forced to change or become irrelevant.
It doesn’t make sense any longer for the church to continue its attitude toward homosexuality. We all ought to rejoice when two adults commit themselves to a relationship that binds them together in mutual help. I have lived long enough to watch a man dying of AIDS, and I have seen his partner sit by his bedside and hold his hand with as much loving concern as I have ever seen a husband hold a wife’s hand or a mother cry over a child’s pain. We need to recognize these deeply committed relationships.
The church has waffled all over the place. Do you know that there was a time when the church called left-handed people the “children of Satan?” For years, we attempted to change people who were left-handed and to force them to be right-handed when it was against their nature.
Homosexual commitments do not threaten your marriage. Think about it. Why should it? It is like Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” “There is something that doesn’t like a wall that wants it down.” I could go ahead and quote the whole poem, but the important part is that you put up a fence where cattle are likely to get in and eat someone else’s crops. Then he chuckles and says, “but I have apples and you have pine cones. My apples are never going to eat your pine cones.” It doesn’t make any sense. There is something that doesn’t like a wall. We need to work on happiness of committed families and of relationships.
Let’s begin to talk about the disaster of divorce. Do you know that when I was ordained 50 years ago, I couldn’t perform a wedding ceremony for someone who was divorced? Now, we even have a liturgy in our Book of Worship for the dissolution of a marriage. We know that somehow the world has changed. Women don’t have to stay in a marriage that is bad for them. A trilogy: “I thought I was getting an ideal, it turned out to be an ordeal, and now I need a new deal.”
I look out over this congregation. I see people who have been married more than 50 years, people who have had a second chance, and some even a third chance. We need to recognize that. The church can’t hide. We can’t pretend. We are like that proverbial frog who is sitting in a cold pot of water on a stove. Somebody turns the stove on. It gets a little warm and that is all right. Suddenly it gets warmer and warmer. The frog doesn’t jump out because he doesn’t think it will get any warmer and he is boiled alive. The church is like that frog, just sitting and sitting. It’s not that people are going to give us a bad time. They are just going to ignore us. We will become irrelevant.
I am in the stands now. I’ve lived a good many years down on the field. I am more and more persuaded that the church needs to give up its Christian imperialism. Do you know what I mean? Look around us. We are a minority faith in the world. The old dream that somehow we were somehow going to convert the entire world to Christianity has to be forsaken. We are not. We don’t need to. Maybe we ought not intend to.
Robert Fulgham has that wonderful little statement, “Arguing whether or not a God exists is like fleas arguing whether or not the dog exists. Arguing over the correct name of God is like fleas arguing over the name of the dog. And arguing over whose notion of God is correct is like fleas arguing over who owns the dog.”
We live in a world in which people have discovered God through many avenues and in many ways.
I don’t mean that we should not share our faith, nor do I mean that you should sit back and say, “Why have I been believing this all my life if there are other ways?” I found my way to God through Jesus Christ. I am happy with that. I am content with it. I believe that it is terribly important to who I am.
I know there are people who are sitting there saying, “but what do you do with the scripture ‘no one comes to the Father but by me.’” I have an explanation for it which may not suit you. The Christian faith is the only one that describes God as a loving parent. That is our contribution. God is personal. God loves us like the parent who sustains us and helps us. God is a parent figure so that when Jesus was in his extremity, he returned to the familiar of the child. It isn’t “Father.” It’s “Abba” (Daddy). The incarnation is so real to me. I believe that the best way of discovering what God is like is to watch this man walk the hills of Galilee. I believe that. I want to share it, but I must not impose it.
Have you ever tried to explain the trinity to somebody who isn’t familiar with it? One of the wonderful stories that came out of my time in Boston as a student was that at Filenes, one of the big department stores, a man keeled over of a heart attack. It happened that Cardinal Cushman, legendary in Boston, was there, and they beckoned him to administer the last rites. Cushman rushed over and looked down at the man. His first words were, “Do you believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit?” The man looked up at the crowd and said, “My God, I am dying and he is asking me riddles!”
It is a part of our experience. It is meaningful to me. Some of you waded through that tiny little book called The Shack. Somebody called it the “Trinity for Dummies.” One part that I really loved was that God the Father was pictured as a black woman, but when they were talking about the crucifixion, the Father figure in The Shack had the same wounds on her hands as did Jesus. That’s what Christianity means to me. I share that with anyone willingly, but I do not demand that they believe the same.
Wendell Berry has written that wonderful novel, Jaybear Crow about a young man who wanted to be a preacher but instead became a barber. He felt that was a better profession. He also was the caretaker of the graveyard. In one of his reminiscences, he says this:
All my life I had heard preachers quoting John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” They would preach on the second part of the verse, to show the easiness of being saved (“Only believe”). Where I hung now was the first part. If God loved the world even before the event at Bethlehem, that meant that God loved all of us.
If you want it in theological language, hear Paul Tillich saying:
You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!
John Wesley, our spiritual forebear, had a very famous quote about theology. He argued theology with a lot of people, but he said, “I care not what your theology is. If your heart be with mine, give me your hand. You are my brother.” Can that not be extended to people of good will of all faiths?
Somehow there needs to be in all of this a word of universal hope. At my age, I conduct more funerals now than I do baptisms. I do funerals for all kinds of people. Some have been the pillars of this church and some have never darkened any church’s door. People have asked me, “What do you say? How can you do that? What voice of hope can you give?” I have found it more and more easy the older I have gotten. I am now persuaded that there is no Saint Peter at a gate testing you on your theology, whether or not you can give Calvin’s institute word for word. I am now persuaded that you don’t have to belong to any certain church or to any church. That isn’t the ticket. I am now more and more persuaded that you don’t have to be baptized or baptized in any special way. I am certainly glad that you don’t have to get final rites in some purification form.
Did you ever think that William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” would have been shorter if only Hamlet had not believed that? He was going to kill his stepfather because he had murdered Hamlet’s father. He got his knife out and was ready to kill him but the guy is praying in the chapel. Hamlet said, “If I kill him now, he will go to heaven,” so we go through three more acts!
I have come more and more to believe in universal salvation. Part of that is that if I don’t believe it, I have to believe in eternal damnation. I cannot conceive of the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ sending somebody to eternal punishment. Is there life beyond the grave? My answer is “Yes.” I can’t prove that any more than my friends who say there is nothing beyond the grave can prove that, but I can hope for what might be.
Gloria and I had a wonderful opportunity this past week. We went to what Indiana University calls The Mini University. You go for a week, and your mind gets exploded with new ideas. You get to think about new ideas for the rest of the year. One of the classes I attended was to visit the experimental house where they are helping seniors live independently. I like that idea, so I thought I would find out something about that. They divided us into groups. Each individual group went to a different room, and each room had something they thought might be helpful in living independently as you age. We were in the kitchen. They showed us a stove that turned itself off so that if you absentmindedly left something on the burner, it wouldn’t burn the house down. While we were in the kitchen, we could see, but our presenter could not, lights coming on along the baseboard. We would have ignored it if they were on with an even pattern but sometimes they were coming on and sometimes they were off. It was perplexing. Then our group shifted and the next room we went to was the bedroom. Here it was demonstrated that if you were an elderly person living alone with all the lights out and you got hungry or had some other urgent need, the moment that you got out of bed, your feet hit a pad that was all along the bed and a string of lights came on. As they turned the corner, the lights were on the baseboard so that you could find your way where you needed to go. I thought that there had to be a message there. I think the message is that we don’t know everything now. All we see are blinking lights but someday it will be clear. Or to quote scripture, “We see in a mirror dimly but then face to face.”
I agree with Ben Franklin who says, “You ask me to describe heaven. I can’t. I think I will find out soon enough, and I am willing to wait.”
And yet, John Greenleaf Whittier:
Alas for him who never sees
The stars shine through his cypress trees,
Who, hopeless, lays his dead away,
Nor looks to see the breaking day
Across the mournful shadows play.
Who hath not learned, in hours of faith,
The truth to flesh and sense unknown,
that Life is ever Lord of Death,
And Love can never lose its own!
I have always been privileged to have friends who are smarter than I am. A good friend of mine, Mark Trotter was visiting with a woman who was dying. An orderly was listening in. When Mark left the room, the orderly really jumped on him. He said, “You are comforting her about death. What is it like to die?” ”I don’t know,” I answered, “except that I think it’s going to be grand.” To which he said, “No, I mean what will it be like? What’s going to happen? How will it look?” Trotter said, “I could have pulled out my New Testament, opened it to I John, chapter three, but I answered him this way:
‘For some it will mean that we no longer have to live under the burden of physical hardship.
For others it will mean that we no longer have to live with the past that will not go away.
For others it will mean no longer having to live with a future that will not come.
And for still others, it will mean that some imperfection in our life that continues to cause us to mess up our life, will no longer have the power to hinder us.’”
I don’t know if any of you are as amused as I am about the brouhaha about whether or not the atheists can put a sign on the back of a bus. “You can be good without God.” Duh...of course. Why don’t they say something important? The reverse of that is the important thing. “Can you be God without being good?” The answer from the Christian perspective is “No.” This is the God that I trust with my life today, with my life tomorrow, and with life beyond. When I discuss with my atheist friends who are always trying to convince me that when this life is over, it is over, I always think, “I hope they are wrong. I would like to see the look on his face when he dies and he hears, “Surprise!” If he is right, what do you have to lose?
What then remains for those of us who claim religion and for those of us who have committed our lives to it. Some of us have lived within the church most of our lives. Some of us have just come to it. All of us are here because we need and want. What does God require of us? I have always liked Micah’s answer, “What doth the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God.”
But I am stuck with the scripture which was picked for today. Did you notice how hard I tried to read it with meaning? I want you to take a highlighter and pick up the important parts. This is Paul who is the great apostle of faith. “By grace are you saved through faith.” He is the one who argues against all works as being unimportant at all but it is what you believe and how you feel. Now suddenly in his second letter to Corinthians, a church with whom he has had some problems, he writes these words, “Now as you excel in everything–in faith, in speech, in knowledge” (now jump down to the important thing). He says, “Now do something, attempt something, finish something.” What Paul is challenging that church to do is get up off your pews and make a difference in the world you live in.
Some of you are going to leave this place and walk on “Trail B.” The city has provided this wonderful new experience for people who never thought of walking to a grocery store but who now are going to drive and walk on a beautiful trail with a lot of other people. It will add to the ambience of the city. I am all for that, but that struggle over politics that we had while people living in the woods freezing so we couldn’t get a shelter keeps getting in my head. Thank God for Trinity Episcopal Church who said the city is not going to tell us that we can’t provide shelter.
Nobody has loved the arts of this city more than I have. Gloria and I used to go annually to something called the Spilato Festival in Charleston, South Carolina because in a few brief days there, we could be immersed in the arts. We could hear the great music, we could see the great dramas, and we could see the experimental things that were going on. Since we moved to Bloomington, we haven’t gone once, because we don’t have to. It is all right here. On any given day, you can be thrilled with great music and great plays. There is an abundance, but I am troubled by something that we as a church began, the Shalom Center. I work there, and I try to raise money. I see more and more people coming. I see people who have never had to come before. I see a young woman with three children, and she says, “I don’t know what to ask for. I’ve never had to ask for anything before.” A man shows up who leaves his home with his wife and children thinking he is going to work. He knows he cannot work. He has no job. He says, “How can you do something? I can’t even face my family. I have always earned a living.” I sit on a board and I see a $40,000 gap between what we see coming in and what we need by the end of the year, and I wonder, “What can we do?” I hear those haunting words of Jesus, “In as much as you have done it for the least....I was hungry. You gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was lonely and you came to me”. On and on and on.
What makes a Christian? I remember that story of the Quaker walking down the street when he was accosted by a young evangelical who was certain what needed to be done. The young man with great enthusiasm asked, “Are you saved? Are you a Christian?” The old Quaker took a pen out and a piece of paper and wrote. He handed him the paper and said, “Here’s the name and phone number of my wife, my neighbors, and my coworkers. Call them and ask them if I am a Christian. They would have a better answer than I?”
I remember Edgar Guest’s little poem:
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.
It is how you act and how you live. That’s our challenge. Let God do what God does best, love us and provide for us here and in the hereafter. Let our challenge be to open our arms to all of God’s children - ALL OF GOD’S CHILDREN. Let us be about the task of making this world more like God intended it to be.
This is almost a confession. I bought a cell phone. Times change and so must we! You all know how I’ve laughed about cell phones. Women have it all too good. You can hide your cell phone in a purse but there’s not enough room in our pockets so we men have to put them on our hips like a holster. I thought that gave men a lot more strut. You have one of those things and you are important. I almost bought a holster just to put on my hip. Nobody looks anyway, and they might think I had already bought one. I do confess that they irritate me when they go off in the middle of a program or service. I think it is absolutely rude in a restaurant eating with somebody talking with somebody else on a cell phone. I admit to being frightened beyond words to see somebody 18 or under or 18 or over talking on a cell phone making a turn with one hand while their car is aimed at me. But there have been those times when I wished I could have been reached and could not be because I was so stubborn and I didn’t have one.
Thomas Friedman in his book Hot Flat Crowded has this wonderful statement: “When the wind changes direction, there are those who build walls and those who build windmills.” I have chosen to buy a cell phone maybe because of that. I want to use what is available to help.
A cell phone doesn’t work unless you turn it on. Christianity doesn’t work unless you use it. The other thing I have discovered is that you have to take it back and plug it in occasionally to recharge it. I like to think that is what we do on Sunday mornings. The work of the church is done every day of the week. The work of the faith is done every moment of the day. On Sunday morning, we come to recharge. That’s what it is about. When I hear an anthem like, “When Morning Gilds the Skies, may Jesus Christ be praised.” I am ready to go out and try it again.
Never say “never.” I never intended to preach again. You may never want me to preach again, but if I had to preach again, it would be that change happens, and we have to change or we will be left in the backwaters of history as irrelevant. Amen.
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