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Church Sermons
The Sixth Sunday after
Epiphany – February 15, 2004
Psalm 1
In the course of my ministry I’ve been asked two questions that are particularly profound. Strangely enough, both questions were asked by children, and both children belonged to my very first church. I was a fresh young seminary graduate who knew everything there was to know. So I can understand why they would come to me with their questions.
The first question came from a little boy who stood one day in the grasp of his mother coming through the receiving line at the door after church. “Michael has a question to ask you,” she said. “Go ahead, honey.” Michael shuffled his feet a little, as if mustering up the courage. Then he looked up at me in my long flowing robe, and this is what he said.
“Are you God?”
What a smart little boy!!! I said, “Of course I’m God, Michael, and don’t you ever forget it!” Actually, I deferred to my better judgment and simply answered, “No, Michael, I’m just one of God’s helpers.”
Poor little kid. Now disillusioned, he walked away sort of shaking his head, probably thinking, “Nah! He’s GOT to be God. I mean ,just look at the guy!”
Oh, out of the mouths of babes!
The second best question I’ve ever been asked came out of the mouth of a little girl. It was just before Children’s Day and we were rehearsing a great big Noah’s Ark skit. Some of the men had built a cardboard ark, and an artistic woman had made a series of cutouts that when moved in opposite directions looked like a raging sea. The kids were divided up as the animals, coming two-by-two, and one of the older boys was Noah. I played the part of Mrs. Noah who almost missed the boat because she was out shopping.
Well, somewhere in the middle of this big production a little girl came up to me, clutching in her hand the paper from her Sunday School class lesson about Noah’s Ark. She looked up at me with these big blue saucer-sized eyes and shyly asked, “What about the children?” I said, “Well, honey, all the children are going to be animals. Come and I’ll make you a rhinoceros.”
But that didn’t do it for her. “No,” she said, pointing to the picture of the Ark she was holding. “Oh!” I said, “Well, Noah’s children are right there with him on the Ark, see?” And sure enough, there were Shem, Ham, and Japheth standing on the deck with their dad as the rainwaters flooded the earth and the Ark rose up and set sail.
But she was still shaking her head. “No,” she persisted, “what about these children?”
And then she pointed to the people in the water - the people who would die in the flood. I’m not sure the Sunday School curriculum people had actually drawn any children into that picture, but there were people crying out as the waters rose. I guess she just supposed there must have been children among them.
What about the children?
I’m ashamed to say that, though I bumbled through a fake answer for this little girl, her question really stumped me. And what was at the heart of my shame was the fact that I – a well-educated, seminary-graduated minister who kids sometimes mistook for God Himself – had never even thought about that question.
What about the children?
Researchers who study religious trends tell us that one of the reasons people in our day are turning away from the Church is because the faith we proclaim is unwilling to take up questions like that. People feel that the Church is out of touch with reality, irrelevant to life as it really is, and not willing to deal with the deep questions of life. For instance, while people all around us worry about the proliferation of violence and abuse against children in our world, we Christians often find ourselves defending the violence and abuse propagated against children on the pages of the Bible. Thinking that we are defending the Bible – or even God, we often pass over texts like the Noah story without ever getting around to the question decent people everywhere are asking.
“What about the children?”
I’m beginning a new series of sermons today that I want to call, “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The 21st-Century…”
You know, all around us, the world is changing! I noticed it in an amusing sort of way eight years ago when I first moved to Tellico Village and started visiting some of you who had recently retired. Among the unopened boxes strewn about your new home was one containing your very first personal computer. I learned then that some of you had ended your careers right at the time personal computers were just starting to show up on every desk in the business world. You missed that first wave of universal computerization. But when you retired, you took the leap and went out and got your first PC, or Mac. And I’ll bet you recall how intimidated you were when you finally got around to opening that box. I know that a number of you sat entangled in a spaghetti sea of cables, cords, disks and peripheral components muttering, “You’ve got to be kidding! I’ll never get this thing to operate!”
Thank goodness your 8-year old grandchild came for a visit, and taught you how to run the danged thing! And now…now you’re out there surfing the net like a pro, linking to sources of information that have brought into your life bodies of knowledge far exceeding anything you ever learned in school or gleaned from the many years of your life experience.
Your world has changed. The whole world is changing.
The advent of the Internet alone marks a new social revolution that is bigger than even the invention of the printing press. If the printing press enabled knowledge to seep into the life of the average person, the Internet is a virtual flood of knowledge. But not only that, it is an information superhighway that brings people into virtual communities with folks they never in their lives would otherwise be able to connect with. Why, just in our families alone, email allows us to cover the distance between East Tennessee and everywhere else. And with the new wireless technologies, the distances are shrinking even more. Does anyone here this morning have one of those cell phones with a camera in it? If you do, let me ask you to do something special this morning. Take out your phone and snap a picture of us here in worship! And then send it to someone! You have my permission to do that. What a unique way of bringing a friend to church – or a church to a friend! Who would have imagined such a thing just a few years ago?
The world is changing. Historians tells us the modern period in which we all grew up has now crossed over into a new technologically-driven epoch which they call postmodern. It’s a world that is characterized by many huge paradigm shifts, the two most important of which I believe are information and community. Borders no longer separate people, nations or even religions. And people – armed with all this new information and cross-cultural influence have learned to think for themselves.
Oh, a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st
century. We learned to think for ourselves!
You know, it used to be that the Church told everybody what to think. Let us do your thinking for you, said the Church. You can trust us, and the world will be a safer place if we don’t have all you crazy people running around saying things you know nothing about.
And this was not just a suggestion! People like Galileo whose scientific studies showed that the earth moves around the sun and not the other way around as the Church taught was put on trial for heresy! Under threat of death, he was forced to renounce his scientific findings. A funny part of that story, though, is that at the end of the trial, as Galileo was being led away after he said what the Church wanted him to say, he reportedly turned and whispered to someone in Latin, “E pur si muove” which means, “Nevertheless it does move!”
Galileo. Charles Darwin. The Church did it to him, too, and in some quarters is still doing it. Black slaves told not to think about freedom because slavery was the will of God. Emancipated women told to be unquestionably submissive to their husbands – even the men who abused them.
And you. Yes, you. The Church has not always appreciated your need to think for yourself!
But it wasn’t always so!
Our faith began as a thinking person’s faith! From the days of the Old Testament to the New Testament, people were encouraged to think freely as an expression of faith itself! A faith that dares to think, you see, is a faith that truly believes God will lead us to the Truth as we walk and think with Him and each other!
That’s why Hymn #1 in the Old Testament hymnal – the Book of Psalms – is a hymn about thinking as the most basic act of faith. Did you know that? THINKING is a foundational aspect of faith! Listen to how Hymn #1 goes:
“Blessed is the
person who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or stand in the way of
sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the Torah, and on
the Torah he meditates day and night.”
Those who are in my Sunday School class know that the word meditate does not mean to just sit there on your butt, in the lotus position, humming a mantra, and seeking the experience of being absorbed into the universe. Some forms of meditation do that, but not in Psalm 1. This word meditate here has force behind it. It means to tear it apart, to analyze, to question, to wonder, to THINK! THINK about the stories of God! THINK about what they mean! THINK about what they reveal! THINK about the questions they raise!
And then, when you’re done thinking about them, THINK about them some more! THINK in the morning! THINK at noontime! THINK in the afternoon! THINK through the night! Twenty-fours a day, 7-days a week, 365 days a year, THINK about the stories of God and His world.
And why should we THINK?
Because when you do, the Hymn says, you are, “… like a tree planted by streams of water, yielding fruit in its season, and whose leaf does not whither.”
In other words, THINKING will lead you to a faith whose roots are always sinking deeper, and that will hold no matter how the world around you changes.
Once upon a time, a certain man was reading the story of Noah’s Ark. He felt glad that Noah and his family escaped the flood. But he was troubled that so many died.
“What about the children?” he asked.
Well, he thought about this question over and over. He prayed about it every day. The more and more he meditated on it, the less and less sure he was of the answer. Certainly the children were innocent of sins deserving death. Clearly God’s love was not limited to Noah and his family. What was the meaning of this side of the story? What was God trying to say? All the easy answers he got at church – almost always about these innocent children receiving judgment - seemed not to ring true.
Then one night, in the middle of his sleep, the man had a dream. In the dream, God took him back through time, and together they stood – God and this man – in the very moment of the Great Flood.
There was the ark – 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. It was floating away with Noah at the helm, family members and animals alike crowded inside.
And there were the people left behind, adults and children alike, thrashing in the rising water, crying out to be saved.
Then spoke God, in a deep and resonant voice. “What do you think the story means for the world in which you live?”
The man looked again at the tragic scene. He thought and thought. And then he knew.
“Lord,” he said, “I think that the world today is full of children and adults who are drowning in a sea of violence, injustice, and inhumanity.”
The Lord sadly nodded his head. Then God said, “And what else do you think?”
The man once more looked over at the ark – 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. Crammed with all the people and animals it could fit, it bobbed there in the water, carrying them all to the safety of a new world.
Then the man looked up at God. “I think I know.” he said.
“What do you think?” asked the Lord.
“I think we need……. to build
more and bigger Arks!”
And I am told that, to this very day, this man works through his church in the community where he lives trying to make the world a safer and better place for children.
A funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. God challenged us to start thinking again!
How might that happen in your life? How might we as a church start to think through the crucial issues facing the world here in the new postmodern era? How can we reclaim Christianity from the thoughtless drivel that is so predominant today? How can we bring Christ to a world that thinks the Church is irrelevant?
I don’t claim to know the answers to these important questions. But I do have some ideas. And I wonder if you’d be willing to share your ideas with me?
We have a new world. We need a new Church.
A Church that knows how to sing Hymn #1 as we think and march together into the 21st century!