The Mayberry Preacher

A COMMUNITY OF GRACE: LIVING GOD'S WORD

Exodus 13: 17-22, Luke 10: 1-12
Steve Lindsley
Rally Day Sunday
August 29, 2010

So where are we going?  If you’re a passenger on certain flights of a particular airline, apparently you are going nowhere.  In a move that some airline experts feel will catch on in the ever-economizing travel industry, the marketing gurus at El Al Airlines are now offering flights that have no set destination point. This means, quite literally, that they take off from the Jerusalem airport but never actually leave the air space above the city.  However, passengers do enjoy a gourmet dinner, drink from a "bottomless" glass of wine and choose from one of four films playing in the cabin - all for a mere $85. Says an El Al spokesperson, "I think it's going to be a great success."

So where are we going?  Ted was a guy who was really searching for an answer to this question.  Ted was 31 years old when he walked into the pastor’s office that spring afternoon to speak with Craig Barnes, then pastor of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington DC.  As Craig tells it, Ted was divorced, a father to a little girl who lived with her mother, and new to the church.  He had recently come to DC to “get a fresh start” after his marriage fell apart.  It didn’t take him long to land a job with one of the high-tech firms in the town, and it took even less time for him to decide that he hated the job as much as the last one.  But he had a lot of bills and child support to pay, so he really needed it.  He had met a lot of people since moving to the area, but he wasn’t really close to anyone, including the woman from work with whom he sometimes spends the night.  “At least it keeps the loneliness away,” the man sighed.  “You know, the nights are the worst.”

After this extended introduction, Craig finally asked Ted why he had come to see him, thinking he would surely say that he was at the end of his rope and was wondering what God had to do with his life.  Instead, Ted asked Craig if he could use his connections in the church to help him get a job on Capitol Hill. 

So where are we going?  Where are we going?  What is our purpose?  What is our direction, our goal, our destination?  Are you and I all that clear about the course our life will take, our mission and where it will lead us?  Or are we helplessly lost, resigned to being nothing more than aimless wanderers endlessly searching for some elusive truth?

It’s an important question for us to ask.  Because, once we get past the very basic needs of food, water, air, and shelter; we find that every one of us hungers for direction and a purpose.  It’s what holds everything around us together.  We need to feel there is something that guides our steps and gives our existence validation.   Otherwise, we're nothing more than an El Al passenger; cruising along and enjoying the finer things in life, but going nowhere fast.  Or we find that Ted’s story becomes our story; a string of disappointments and grasping for straws, hoping desperately that one of them will be that missing piece in our lives.

So where are we going?  It was a question an entire nation asked themselves with each step they took.  They knew where they had been, and they weren’t going back.  You know their story.  Charlton Heston made a movie about it.  Disney made a cartoon from it.  God’s people were living torturous lives as slaves in the great Egyptian empire. Long gone were the days when their ancestor Joseph was revered as one who saved Egypt from starvation.  Now, all Pharaoh saw were hundreds of thousands of people who could rise up against him and threaten his power.  So he did what countless dictators have done down through the years – he took away their power and made them his slaves.

One man, though, decided he could stand this no longer.  He challenged Pharaoh, speaking on God’s behalf.  Let my people go, Moses said.  Only after ten plagues did Pharaoh let the Hebrews go free.  Overnight, it seemed, an entire nation mobilized, packed up and headed out of Egypt’s gates; out into the vast desert and the “Promised Land” that God had in store for them.

Imagine what that must have been like.  They had no idea – no idea – where they were going.  All they knew is that they were leaving behind a place that harbored bitter memories.  But you have to figure at some point, as the gates of Egypt grew smaller and smaller behind them, and as the desert in front of them continued to expand, it had to have been on their minds: Where are we going?

God, of course, knew the cries of their hearts.  After a generation of oppression, God wasn’t about to let his people be lost again.  So scripture tells us that, as they made their way into the deep desert, God guided their path with a cloud by day and a pillar of fire at night.  All the Hebrews needed to do was to look up and follow the cloud and fire, and the Promised Land would come.  It would take them forty years, but it would come. 

A cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.  Seems almost too good to be true, doesn’t it?  I mean, here are these people, wandering into the unknown future before them.   And here is a God who gives them the direction they so desperately need with cloud and fire – day and night, a never-ending personal tour guide; leading them away from a bitter past into their promised future.

Now let me ask you something – what would you give to know, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the course your life is taking, the direction you’re heading in, is precisely where God wants you to go?  Not only that, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if we as a church, a community of grace - if we, like Israel, had a figurative cloud and pillar of fire to guide our way, to be assured that everything we do and all we are is in sync with God’s will for us?

It seems to me that this image of the cloud and the fire is especially appropriate as we gather together on this Rally Day Sunday.  For we're engaged in a similar journey, aren’t we?  Here we chart our course as God’s people, coming together for worship, for study, for fellowship, for service.  We come together because, simply put, this is our "living out" of God's word.

But that’s not all there is to this journey.  I mean, look at the Hebrews – as they left behind the gates of Egypt and their painful past there, they faced other challenges and threats.  They faced the depths of an endless desert that had claimed the life of many before them.  They faced the bitter wrath of Pharaoh and his army.  Even as God was leading them in their journey, that did not change the fact that they still faced all kinds of threats coming at them from all sides.  

Our journey today isn’t all that different, is it?  We may not have to worry about the harsh desert climate here in the foothills of North Carolina.  And no Pharaoh’s army is “out to get us.”  But you and I, we still know the pitfalls of the journey.  We live in a culture, in a world that does not see the same cloud and pillar of fire that we do.  We live in the midst of a world that is at best indifferent and sometimes hostile to those who would follow the way of the Lord.  And if we're honest with ourselves, we're not without blame either.  Sometimes we just plain ignore the cloud and the fire before us.  All of which makes being a community of grace and living God's word the joyful struggle it is.

In a book aptly titled, Resident Aliens, authors Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon recall a time in their life when they first experienced the struggles of the faith journey.  For them, it happened in their youth in Greenville, South Carolina, when, in defiance of the state’s time-honored blue laws, the Fox Theater downtown opened for the first time on Sunday.  As they recall, they and five other youth – regular attenders of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at the church in town – made a pact to enter the front door of the church, be seen, and then quietly slip out the back door and join John Wayne at the Fox.

Nowadays, of course, movie theaters all over the country are open on Sundays.  And that’s really not the point anyway – it’s not Sunday movies that’s threatening.  The point is that something changed for those young men that day that made them realize there was something outside their Christian-culture world, something other than the cloud and pillar of fire.  Now there existed a choice.  God was still very much there, but so was the vastness of the desert and the approaching army.  And it would forever be that way.

Today, as the people of God, you and I know the pitfalls of the journey.  We feel it when we wake up on Sunday morning and sense the lure of the morning paper and the cup of coffee over Sunday worship.  We feel it in the workplace when the easy way out, albeit not the most ethical, captivates our attention.  We feel it in school when it’s easier to go along with the crowd rather than reach out to the kid who has no one.  We feel it anytime the whims of the world clash with the steadfastness of our faith, leading us away from the cloud and the fire that serve to guide us.

And that’s why it seems to me that at some point our role has to evolve from simply being followers to being followers who then lead.  We follow the same God who faithfully led us out of Egypt, but we also, through that following, commit ourselves to serve in God’s name.  It’s precisely what Jesus did when he sent the seventy out in pairs to serve as witnesses to his life and ministry.  The harvest is plentiful, Jesus told them, but the laborers are few.  I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves.

Jesus knew as well as anyone the threatening world that exists alongside the cloud and the fire.  Jesus knew that there would be pitfalls, there would be choices; and Jesus knew that there would be those who would choose to go the way of the Fox Theater over the youth group.  But Jesus also knew, as you and I do, that there are a whole lot of El Al passengers out there, a whole lot of Teds who simply need to refocus on the cloud and the fire that’s right in front of them.  And Jesus knew that he could help all of us find our way home to that wonderful community of grace.   

Friends, as that community we know as the First Presbyterian Church of Mount Airy, the task of the Hebrews and the seventy with Jesus continues to be our task today.  As we continue following God’s bold lead, wherever that might take us, we are called to reach out to those who feel lost, as well as those who might be overwhelmed by the pitfalls of the journey.  And as we come together on this special Sunday, living God's word together, we give thanks for those in our midst who have responded to God’s lead by being leaders in their own right.  We give thanks for:

• The teachers of our new Spark Ministry
• Our officers and elders
• Our ministry teams and their members
• Our youth advisors
• Our mentors who work with our confirmands
• Our Bible study teachers
• Our choir members and worship ushers
• Those who serve meals to the hungry and build homes for the homeless
• Our nursery workers

We give thanks to God for these servants, and all servants of God, because they live out God’s word with people who need to hear it; they shine God’s love upon people who are surrounded by darkness; they show God’s faithfulness to people who are lost, who are hurting, and who simply want to find their way home. 

So – not to belabor the point, but Where are we going?  I would suggest to you, friends, that the answer should be that we are going wherever God leads us.  A community of grace, living God's word, today, tomorrow, forever.  Let the journey begin!  Thanks be to God.  AMEN.

A VISION TO GUIDE US

Deuteronomy 6: 4-9
Steve Lindsley
Rally Day Sunday
August 30, 2009


It was nothing more a sliver of water – the Jordan River – that stood between where they had been and where they were going.  It was a few hundred feet across to the other side; too wide and too deep to be made on foot.  But as great as that gap was, the distance between their storied past and their hopeful future had never been shorter.

And as the people of God gathered by the river's edge that day and soaked up the scene of mountains and dust, hills and sun, rocks and sky, they remembered.  It had been similar fanfare at the very beginning of it all, when shouts of joy and thanksgiving accompanied a hasty exit out of the shackles of Egypt.  Then came the journey that would seemingly go on forever – forty years searching for a home.  Children were born and had children of their own during that time.  Teenagers became grandparents.  Two generations had known nothing but the hardship of the desert and the constant motion of nomadic lifestyle.

Until now.  Now they found themselves at that point where past, present and future collide.  Now, as the soft ripples of the Jordan River lapped onto the shore, the Hebrew nation gazed off into the distance and witnessed the unveiling of their salvation.  They called it “The Promised Land” because it had been a promise for so long – a conversation between a God and his people, centuries in the making.  It was a promise of descendants and land.  It was a promise of unbroken faithfulness.  And it was a promise of hardship too; hardship they'd certainly faced leading up to this point. 

But at this moment, at this snapshot in time, the people looked across the waters to their promise, their hopes, their dreams fulfilled.  The Promised Land.  There it was, finally within their reach!  They would know the taste of it soon enough; they would live into the plan that God had set in motion thousands of years before.  They would know, after all that time, what it finally meant to be a people with a home. 

But not yet.  Not quite yet!  It's not quite time to follow in the Ark's path and watch the waters part, as they did a generation before.  It's not quite time for the promise's fulfillment.  Now, at this critical juncture, it is time to listen – to hear God's word read, to hear the great man Moses speak words of encouragement, words of instruction, words of warning.  To stand in that rare, sacred space of past, present and future and let the vision take hold of them.

Vision.  It is a complex word, isn't it?  It can refer simply to seeing something right in front of you – the road you're driving on, the book you're reading, the sunset in the distance.  But vision can also talk about things we can't see; things that haven't come to pass; things that guide us not out of their presence among us but out of the promise of their fulfillment. 

Our scripture reading this morning speaks of this; the foundation of things that visions are built upon.  It's known in Hebrew as the Shema – that word literally means “to listen” or “to hear.”  The passage commands God’s people to internalize God’s word – to literally make it part of their being.  God’s word was to surround them, night and day.  It was recited to their children, bound on their hands and foreheads, and even written on the doorposts of their homes.  That last one is interesting – some Jewish families still observe it today with what's called a mezuzah. It’s a small enclosed container fastened to the doorway in a Jewish home.  Rolled up inside the mezuzah is a scroll inscribed with this passage from Deuteronomy.  In an observant Jew's home, a mezuzah is hung on the doorway of every room, welcoming and reminding everyone who enters that the Lord's presence is there.
    Just as Deuteronomy resonated deeply with the Hebrews alongside the River Jordan that day, so it still cries out to us, down through the centuries, for a similar kind of focus in our walk of faith.  So an “inward expression” in the church speaks to nurturing our faithful relationships with one another. Because Jesus lives in us, we edify one another, encourage one another, teach one another, learn from one another. That's what the early church did day in and day out.  And that’s what we are called to continue expressing in the church of the 21st century – to live out and “recite” the Shema so the body of Christ may be built up.

But here’s the thing – vision is not a static entity.  We can’t be just a “status-quo” church, reciting and acting out the Shema “like we always have.”  God's message to us never changes, but the way we convey God's message does.  It has to – because the world around us is changing all the time; it's in constant flux.  When the church falls into the trap of abiding by those famous six words – We've always done it this way – when the church limits itself like this, it reminds us of the beautiful classic car that sit in the driveway with an empty tank – it looks great, but it doesn't do much.

Vision, like the heart of the Shema, calls us to take this faith we claim and let it guide us!  Vision reminds us of where we've been; vision reveals the future that's right in front of us; vision enables us to move ahead.  Vision calls us to change – not change for change's sake, but change for the better.  And sometimes, vision means letting go of what we've known for so long, what we've been so familiar with.

In just a few minutes our church will participate in a special recognition for the Carter Men's Bible class, who after 50 years of meeting in the Scout Hut every Sunday morning has made the difficult decision to bring their ministry to a conclusion.  This is a bittersweet time for them and for us.  But at the same time we are able to give thanks to God for what this group has meant to this church and to this community.  At their final gathering last Sunday, Mike Beal's lesson focused on our scripture today, and it was a very appropriate message for the occasion.  He, too, spoke of a Hebrew people standing at the river's edge, looking back at where they had been and looking ahead at where they were going.  It took courage for the men of that class to make the decision they did, and it took wisdom to know that an ending also leads to a beginning.  It took vision.

So if I may, allow me to lift up this class as an example of what can happen when we let God's vision – and not our own agendas or desires – but God's vision guide us.  Change is never easy, especially when it involves giving up something we're familiar with for something that we're not.  But change is often at the very heart of vision's realization.

So the question for you and for me on this Rally Day Sunday is this: what other changes may be coming our way out of the vision that guides our church?  What new, different, invigorating ways may God be calling us to experience educational ministry and nurture – what will Bible studies and Sunday school look like?  How about our church's mission – just this month we began a partnership with two Presbyterian churches for the Backpack program at a local elementary school; and plans are still in the works for the opening of a coat closet.  It took vision to bring these things to fruition – so what else is coming?  We are just a few weeks away from our fall Discipleship season, when you will be given the opportunity to support the work and ministry of this church through what's being called “The 15+ Plan.”  Will you be part of this plan and join in this vision?  And in the September church newsletter you'll be receiving soon, I extend an invitation to join me in a new visitation ministry to our hospitalized and homebound members.  Who among you will feel called to be part of that vision?

The pursuit of God's vision is the life-blood of the church.  The minute we accept complacency in any shape or form is the minute that the church loses a sense of who it is, where it came from, what it can be.  The minute we are content with being simply believers and not followers, failing to act out the vision that guides us, that is when the body of Christ falls into the trap of assuming that the parts are indeed greater than the whole.  The minute we as a family of faith are more inclined to hold onto our “sacred cows” and resist change of any kind – even when it's addition by subtraction – the minute we do that is the minute we are in danger of losing the vision God has given us.

And that is why for over 4000 years the Shema has been there, speaking the truth deep within the people of God.  That's why we are directed to keep – recite – talk – bind – affix – the word of God.  Because when our labors revolve around that Word, and not our words, we can be assured that God's vision is doing the guiding, leading us precisely where it is we should go.

So on this Rally Day Sunday, we are doing so much more than just gathering for breakfast, worshipping, and enjoying a pig-picking at Westwood Park.  We are the people of God, standing at the river's edge, gazing out at the future ahead of us.  We feel this odd mix of excitement and uncertainty.  We don't always know what's waiting for us on the other side; we don't know what things we may have to let go of or what things we'll be called to embrace.  But we know this, my friends: God goes with us, into whatever our future holds, now and always.  The vision is there to guide us, if we only will let it.

Who's ready to cross to the other side?  Thanks be to God!  AMEN.