So this past Sunday I preached my very first sermon. Hoorrraayyy! It was delivered to a crowd of 65 residents at Goodwin House, Bailey's Crossroads. Goodwin House is the retirement community in which I'm doing my CPE (clinical pastoral education) work this summer as a student chaplain. The average age was about 78-years-old, and the text was Matthew 10:16-33 with some cranky Jeremiah thrown in for the OT reading. The funny part in this whole thing is that they didn't laugh at any of the "humorous" bits, but did laugh at some odd places. I am trying to find a way to upload the audio recording to my blog here, but have run into some interesting technical problems. However, if you have an email account that will withstand the barrage of a 7 MB file hitting it, let me know and I will be happy to email you the audio.
Here's the text. My thanks to Charley Hughes :)
In this morning’s Gospel lesson from Matthew one has to imagine that many a preacher has taken comfort in the words the gospeler writes, “do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time” and indeed as I prepared my sermon for this morning I got a good chuckle. You see, this is the first sermon I have ever preached, so those words definitely hit home!
So as I was preparing for this morning’s sermon I was reminded of my last job before moving to Alexandria to attend Virginia Theological Seminary, I had a job in sales and worked for a company that helped computer programmers find temporary jobs and projects in our clients’ companies. I worked for a gentleman named Charley who was our divisional manager.
Charley was from Tennessee and, in his 12 years with the company, had performed just about every job within our division. One of his charms, and an interesting management skill that he employed with us when things had not gone so well with a particular client or with one of our consultants was that Charley always seemed to have some sort of a story, or saying that was designed to teach us some valuable lesson. He had one for every possible situation. Perhaps you’ve known someone like this in your lives?
Now most often these “Charley-isms”, as we grew to call them, took the form of a home-spun, folksy story or anecdote. Many of these our team found very humorous, not only because of his back-woods Tennessee accent, but because at first blush they seemed to have not much to do with the situation in which we found ourselves.
For example, if one of our consultants quit working on a project for some reason Charley would ask us, “Have you ever tried putting rabbits into a hutch? You put one in and sometimes two jump out…” Or if we were negotiating rates with one of our clients he would offer up this gem, “Have you ever tried to boil a live frog?” Of course none of us had. “You don’t throw him into a pot of boiling water, you put him in a pot of cold water and slowly turn up the heat,” Charley had several dozen of these little stories.
One story he told, however, struck me immediately when I read today’s gospel lesson. Charley gave us this advice when we were trying to pick the right programmer to send to a particularly difficult and challenging assignment.
He instructed us, “explain the job to them on its worst day. Tell them how it will be when the job is the least glamorous and when it will be the most frustrating. Tell them about all the things that could go wrong and all the things of which they should be frightened. If you tell them all of that and they still want the job, why you’ll know you’ve found the right person for the job.”
Last week we heard the naming of the twelve disciples as they received the first part of their instruction on how to go out into the world and deliver the Good News. In the Gospel reading for this week we see Jesus further instructing his disciples before he sends them out into the world. He is telling them what to expect, explaining to them what they will encounter—describing to them just how they will be treated: “I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves”, Jesus says. “You will be handed over to councils and be flogged because of me” he continues. And for the ultimate he tells them, “Brother will betray brother TO DEATH, and a father his child, and children will rise up against parents and have them put to death”! Talk about painting a worst case scenario, my boss Charley would be so proud.
This morning we also hear echoes of this same sentiment in the reading from the prophet Jeremiah. The prophet laments, “I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me. For whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, ‘Violence and destruction!’” Jeremiah continues, “For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and a derision all day long.” In these two readings from Matthew and Jeremiah it is clear that doing the work of God is trying and potentially dangerous and even fatal business. It can turn our friends against us; it can divide our families tearing them apart pitting brother against brother, parents against their children. This is a frightening message—everything that we hold as “safe”: our friends, the people who we know and love even our families may betray us, possibly even to death. I mean, where is the Good News in THAT?
The answer comes in the second half of the gospel we just heard. If you look closely we hear three times to not be afraid. Jesus says in verse 26: “So have no fear of them” those who wish to do you harm, and later in verse 28 he says, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul” and finally in verse 31 he concludes, “so do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows”.
So often times it seems we let fear take over our lives—we get so completely wrapped up in being afraid. I can remember being a young boy, maybe seven or eight years old and being frightened at night by the woods behind our house. It was silly. I would play back there in the woods all day long yet when night fell everything changed. My fears were the worst in the summertime when we slept with the windows open.
My room faced the back of our house, towards the woods and as soon as my parents kissed me goodnight and turned off the light I started to get scared. I would get so scared I would pull the covers up over my head to hide. Sometimes when that wasn’t enough, I’d take my pillow, put it over my head and then throw the covers over myself. I spent many a sleepless, sweat-soaked night like that often staying under the covers until I just couldn’t take the heat any longer. Eventually I would fall asleep when I was so tired I couldn’t stay awake, literally exhausted from being so afraid.
You and I know fear, we know it well. Sometimes it seems we become so terrified of whatever it is we are afraid of that we put all of our thoughts and energy into being afraid—so much so that we become utterly exhausted-- physically and emotionally drained. Maybe it is the fear of things like natural disasters—like the floods that are currently displacing thousands of families in the Midwest. Or, maybe it is the fear that we have for our family, for the safety protection of our children and those we love. Perhaps it is the fear of our bodies and our minds getting older and not operating the way they used to; or the fear of having to move with the upcoming construction and renovation projects going on here at Goodwin House. Maybe it is the fear of simply being alone.
The problem with fear is that it robs us of whatever power we think we have. Fear creates powerless-ness and that loss of control can be debilitating. The truth is that God who creates all, knows all and is all—is in control of even the things we are worried about and the things that make us afraid.
As we look at this gospel lesson the point Jesus is trying to make here is that no matter how hard it gets, how horrible it may seem, God is with us and we are precious to God. God knows everything about us, even the hairs of our head are counted—for some of us counting all our hair may take a little more time than for others, however.
The point simply is this: God knows our fears and is with us when we are afraid. God has given us, through his love and care, freedom from fear.
So, I wonder what would happen, for you and I, if we truly believed that God was present with us in our fear—that the God that made us and infinitely loves us was in control of the very things that made us afraid. I wonder how we would view the world if we truly believed that. In the last month since I have been here at Goodwin House I have seen you all, in this community, at various moments helping one another to become free from fear. I have seen it in small, quiet moments shared between two residents and in larger group settings…in a number of interactions as you help to dispel fear with one another here in this place, becoming the caring, loving and compassionate God for that person who is truly afraid.
Some times it is simply sitting with someone who you know is afraid. Or taking their hand and letting that person know that you are here with them and reassuring that other person it will be alright. Your presence with that person in their fear may be all that it takes.
To live without fear allows you to become free, it allows you love boldly. To live without fear makes you free to love the other person that you find unlovable; to enter into those situations that you know are going to be difficult knowing that God is present with you, and present in the very thing that you find difficult. So, the question for us this morning is: what changes will you make and how boldly will you live truly believing that God has given you freedom from fear? Amen.
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