Psalm 84
Hebrews 10:19-25
Sermon by Rev. J. Barrie Shepherd
Before we pray, let me say a word of thanks to Cindy for the privilege of this distinguished pulpit. I must confess that, as a Presbyterian moving to Maine a couple of years ago, I have felt quite at home here. I was actually baptized in a Congregational church in the north of England, and your UCC tradition and ours are very much the same, apart from some details of church government. All of which reminds me of the tale of the Englishman, an Episcopalian, I hasten to add, who was traveling by train in the notoriously Presbyterian heartland of Scotland. He found himself trapped in one of those old fashioned railway carriages with no corridor, trapped with a most talkative, garrulous Scot. This Scot insisted on trying to strike up a friendly conversation, but the English visitor kept his nose buried in the pages of the Times. Finally however, the Scotsman asked a question he could not resist. “How do you like Scotland anyway?” he inquired. At which the visitor laid aside his newspaper and responded, “To tell you the truth I don’t like it at all here. It’s far too cold, far too damp, and there are far too many Presbyterians.” “Aye well,’ responded the Scot, “if that’s the way you feel, why don’t you just go to hell? I hear it’s very warm there, very dry, and there are no Presbyterians at all.” Well, enough of all that. It’s time to turn again to the scriptures; but first a brief word of prayer:
Let these words that I speak, and the thoughts we all think
bring us closer to you, O God, nearer to one another. AMEN.
In Hebrews, the tenth chapter, the twenty fifth verse:
… not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
… not neglecting to meet together…
What am I doing here in church this dreary November morning? Oh yes, I realize this is a special occasion, that I am here at the gracious invitation of Cindy and your governing board. But I was in church last Sunday also, and the Sunday before that, and the Sunday before that as well. I don’t have to do this, you realize; I’m retired, after all; have been for a good many years now. This is no longer my job, the way I earn my living, as if, by the way, living was ever a thing that had to be earned. What AM I doing here?
Equally curious to me has been the observation that my fellow-retired-clergy over at Piper Shores, thirteen of us there are – surely a portentous number – my fellow retired clergy all seem to share this peculiar habit. First cars out of the parking lot every Sunday morning! I’ve seen some of the poor souls even wearing their dog collars… yes, even when just going to sit in the pews! What are we all up to?
Some kind of cynic might put it down to the “old war horse syndrome.” When the bugle calls to battle they’re struggling upright and pawing the ground, whether able or not. A disinterested observer might simply be astonished. After all they’ve been through; all those interminable meetings, the battles, and trials, committees and compromises, the hardships and humiliations… then add to these today’s wholesale rejection of religion by our modern secular world view, the various scandals that have plagued Christ’s church in our time, and just the sheer multiplicity of other options to occupy Sunday mornings, and it surely is a wonder that they, that we, are showing up at all. And yet, as Martin Luther once famously put it: Here I am; I can do no other.
So this morning I’m offering what might be called a testimony, intensely personal on one level, I guess, but my hope and prayer is that at least some of what I have discovered may also speak to you, may even shed a beam of light upon what YOU are doing here, on why this weekly hour of prayer has also laid its claim on you at whatever stage in life YOU find yourself this Thanksgiving Sunday morning.
And the very first reason I have come up with for my presence in church today – and Sunday after Sunday throughout these retirement years – my first reason is that I am still seeking… I am still seeking. Many years ago, some sixty or maybe closer to seventy now, I set out upon a quest; a quest to find some at least partial answers to this riddle called existence; and I’m still at it; I’m still seeking.
In a letter to the Times of London Valerie Elliot, T. S. Eliot’s widow, wrote the following:
Sir:
My husband, T. S. Eliot, loved to recount how, late one
evening, he stopped a taxi. As he got in, the driver said,
“You’re T. S. Eliot.” When asked how he knew, he replied:
“Ah, I’ve got an eye for a celebrity. Only the other evening
I picked up Bertrand Russell and I said to him: “Well,
Lord Russell, what’s it all about?” and, do you know,
he couldn’t tell me.”
Yours faithfully,
Valerie Elliot
“Well, Lord Russell, what’s it all about?”
Well, I’m not Bertrand Russell, nor T. S. Eliot for that matter; but I think I could begin, at least, to tell you. After all, over fifty years and more of preaching, teaching, writing too, I’ve been working at this, trying my level best to figure things out. Not that I’ve come up with any complete answers; but perhaps, if nothing else, something to be going on with.
I’m pretty much convinced, for example that it’s finally, ultimately, all about love. No, not that sentimental, teenage, torch-song stuff that gets all mixed up with hormones and the like. Rather a king-size, universal, cosmic kind of love; love at the heart and core of this vast pulsing universe; love above, below, beyond and within all that the physicists and astronomers are proposing: a love that, in its own good time (called, by the way, eternity) will wrap us all, and all that is and ever has been, into an embrace, an acceptance, a welcoming, a homecoming that simply staggers the imagination. It was Julian of Norwich, I believe, who assured us many centuries ago that:
All will be well,
And all will be well,
And all manner of things will be well.
But there are dimensions, implications, applications to all this, complications too, that have challenged the human mind since the very dawn of consciousness, and so, yes, I’m still seeking, still seeking.
Howard Lowry of Princeton and Wooster used to describe to his freshman classes a camping trip he went on as a young lad to explore deep caverns in the state of Kentucky. One day, as he tells it:
Far back in the dark of one of the caves, I found myself
crawling along a ledge with a guide and a few companions.
The light from our lanterns flashed back from stalactites
and stalagmites upon the wall of the cave nearest to us.
Suddenly, turning a corner, I came upon one wall covered
with the initials of campers who had preceded us. Among
these names I discovered, to my complete surprise, the
name of my father … carved there many years before.
I leave to your imagination the impression this made on
(me as) a fourteen-year-old boy.
Lowry goes on to urge his students, by the light of the lantern of faith and learning, to seek their Father’s name, their heavenly Father’s name, and so to learn just where, and what, and who they are. Still seeking, then… still seeking.
In the second place, as I probe my motivations, I suspect that I still go because I’m still serving, or at least, still wanting, wishing, striving to serve. My old writer, preacher friend Frederic Buechner once wrote that your vocation is to be found at “the point where your deepest gladness meets the world’s deepest need.” And surely, the most fundamental truth of this Christian faith of ours, the most vital contribution it has made to the eternal quest of all our major religions, is this model of “the life for others.” That, after all, was the fullest, richest impact of this unique belief we call the Incarnation; not just that God loved us enough to take on flesh and bone and blood and walk among us; but that God died for us, God gave God’s very life to save us, and in so doing opened up a life, a new life for others, a life that is found only as it is given away:
For whoever will save his life will lose it; but whoever will
lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it forever.
Not only this, but surely also, in and through this new life of service, we can begin to find answers to that life-long seeking we just spoke of, that seeking after God. Japanese Christian Toyohita Kagawa has written:
God dwells among the lowliest of us. God sits on the dust
heap among the prison convicts. God stands with the juvenile
delinquents. God is there with the beggars. God is among the
sick, Gos stands with the unemployed. Therefore let whoever
would meet God visit the prison cell before going to
the temple. Before he goes to church let him visit the hospital.
Before she reads her Bible let her help the beggar.
While my predecessor in the lofty pulpit of The First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, Harry Emerson Fosdick, put it this way:
If Christianity is a finished set of propositions to be believed,
it is not costly. But if Christianity is an unfinished task to be
completed in this …world… then we are back again at Calvary.
“If anyone would come after me they must deny themselves and take
up the cross and follow me” – that is Jesus calling not for the
acceptance of a theory, but for the assumption of a task.
Still seeking, then; still serving; and thirdly, I’m still sharing. Oh I realize it’s become something of a cliché in our time, times when everyone seems to want to just share something with you and, more often than not, it’s something you’d really rather not “just share” with them. What I mean by this is that old experience we used to call “fellowship,” that “meeting together” that our Hebrews text urged us not to neglect. I mean the experience of community, of joining with others who, for all their differences, still share a set of basic convictions about the meaning of life, and what we’re supposed to be doing with it.
When I show up on Sunday morning I am claiming my place, my place in something bigger and grander, more demanding, but also more inspiring than just getting by, surviving day-to-day. We‘re built like that, you know, we human creatures, we truly do need each other… created for community; and all that rugged individual stuff is for the birds, or maybe just the cowboy movies. Haven’t you noticed, it’s those loners, for the most part, who make problems for the rest; the Hitlers, Stalins, Maos, all those solitary ones whose inner voices lead them to pick up deadly weapons and turn them on the rest of us.
This whole “survival of the fittest” ideology we’ve been taught since Darwin’s time, did you realize today they’re having to give it a second thought? New studies, not just of humans, but even down to the insect level, the cellular level and beyond, suggest that we survive, and move ahead, make progress, evolve, if you like, at least as much through cooperation as through competition, and that prosperity and progress may well result far more from our ability to work together than our ability to beat each other down.
Now wasn’t there someone who talked, and taught, lived and even died about just that? Someone who advised us to love our neighbors, care for our enemies, and to be ready to sacrifice personal needs for the greater good? Anyway, another reason I am here is because I’m still sharing.
And now finally, and briefly I trust, I want to say that I am here in church today, and most every Sabbath day, because I am still following. Doctor Fosdick, a few moments ago, led us all the way back to Calvary, and it is there that we encounter one whose footsteps, successfully or not, we, or at least I, have sought to follow for about as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest, sunniest memories are of Sunday School; of songs and stories, pictures and plays, that led us to the feet of this towering, and yet infinitely welcoming figure; this simple, gentle, yet immensely powerful personality whose teachings, whose example, whose life and death and completely incredible, yet somehow still believable resurrection have tugged, and pulled and called out to the very best of my life from those earliest days to this one.
That lovely old story about the two sets of footprints in the sand, and when they become one set, and the believer thinks she has been abandoned in her time of deepest trouble, only to hear Jesus answer, “That, my child, was when you and I became one, when I became closer to you than breathing, nearer than hands and feet.”
That’s still the goal, that’s still what guides me, leads me on. And that, despite all the other stuff, all the disappointment and disillusionment, – who needs illusions anyway – all the doubt and hesitation, yes, that’s why I still go, that’s why I still go.
Albert Schweitzer, many years ago, wrote haunting words about Jesus that have spoken to a whole century of seeking souls, words that still have power to move our hearts today:
He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old,
by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not.
He speaks to us the same word, “Follow thou me!” and
sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfil for our time. He
commands. And to those who obey him, whether they be
wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the
conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through
in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they
shall learn in their own experience who He is.
Let us pray:
Teach us, good Lord, to seek, to serve, to share and to
follow. And if, and when our spirits falter, as they surely
will at times, grant us to hear and claim the voice that
echoes still beside the lake, the voice of Him who is our
strength, our hope, our very life, our Lord. AMEN.