Sermons from the Pulpit

Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the second Sunday in Lent, March 11, 2001, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35

But our citizenship is in heaven.
-Philippians 3:20

     I guess this is a sermon about heaven. I can't be sure of that, because I do not know much about heaven. This does not mean I am an agnostic. It means there is a difference between knowing and trusting. I have to do a lot more trusting than knowing when I venture into these waters, and so must you.

     Now based on this text from Paul, "Our citizenship is in heaven," I could just launch into that familiar wisdom about how Christians are in the world but not of the world. You've heard it before. We are only sojourners here, just passing through. We are pilgrims traveling to another place, a holy place. We love this place, we love it without reserve, but we do not necessarily endorse the way things are here. We are blessed and perhaps also cursed with a vision of another place, a better place, and that is our center and our home. It means we are forever in tension with our surroundings, never quite at ease, always restless, always questing. Our attitude is subversive toward this world, we are at best the loyal opposition to this world, we imagine that in our prayer and worship and the work of our hands we are building an earthly outpost of the Kingdom of God.

     As I said, you've heard that sermon before in one form or another, from one preacher or another, probably more than once. Normally that wouldn't deter me in the least from preaching it to you yet again in yet another form, and in fact I was planning to do just that. But sometimes you just have to throw out your plans.

     Recently I have experienced a significant amount of helplessness, both my own and that of others, and the experience has adjusted my attitude some, as it usually does. Helplessness is not a new experience for me, but it is an experience that you and I do not easily learn from. In fact, we are continually doing all we can to learn how to deny and overcome helplessness, and we succeed only too well at that, until we have another experience that offers another opportunity for attitude adjustment.

     And that opportunity has presented itself to me in several ways lately, particularly yesterday, when Don Schultz died. If friendship and good wishes and love and prayers and tender loving care, not to mention radiation and chemotherapy, could have overcome his cancer, Don would be sitting right now in the back corner on the stool at the sound console which he donated and installed, trying to make my voice sound good in your ears and making frantic hand signals to Jane to for Pete's sake turn on the power switch to her microphone. God knows Don himself did everything he could to sidestep this death and buy himself more time to enjoy life, which he was very good at doing. But he and the doctors and Judy and all their many friends and relations were helpless to roll back his rapidly advancing mortality.

     And of course I was helpless too. Why should it be any different for me than for everyone else? Because I'm a minister? You've got to be kidding!

     People are always kidding ministers. They tell us it's our job as the local holy person to arrange good weather for the Academy graduation or their daughter's wedding, but they're only kidding. It's such an obvious joke when you attribute divine powers to the poor sap who is only trying to be God's mouthpiece. I heard a snappy comeback from one minister. He said, "I'm in sales, not management." Well, I thought it was snappy.

     But look more closely at the pastoral calling, and the truth of it is that we are the ones who have the obviously impossible task of knowing what to do when there is nothing that can be done. Our job is to help you to live with your own helplessness. And that is what I'm working on with all my might right now.

     The kid who won't grow up, the wedding that doesn't produce a marriage, the drunk who doesn't sober up, the friend who treats you like an enemy, the land mines that keep on blowing up children, the power of greed and the greed of the powerful, the rage that poisons so many of our dealings with other human beings, the gun that is the nerd's revenge on the bully, the cancer that is in remission today and metastatic tomorrow, the mind that goes wandering off and can't find its way back, the phoenix that refuses to rise from its own ashes - whenever nothing works and wherever nothing will fix it, that is the time and a place for ministry. That's what ministry is.

     Well, that's not all it is, not by a long shot. I also spend a lot of my time and energy trying to fix the world and trying to fix you, and it's not always a waste of time. But when I'm being honest, I admit that helplessness is at the heart of it. It's at the heart of the covenant between every church and its pastor, and we all own it. And it should be so, because the only thing that is the peculiar province of churches and ministers is faith, and helplessness is at the heart of faith. It really is.

     I don't like that any better than you do. I have a terrible time being helpless. I can't stand it. You wouldn't believe how much snow I shoveled this week and what a tonic it was to my soul! Ministers love to shovel snow, because when you shovel snow, if you don't drop dead of a heart attack, you win. That's a rare treat for us.

     I guess it's good that I should have the same resistance to helplessness and the same rage against it that anyone else has. How can I be of any use to you in your struggle with it if it's not my struggle too? But you are in luck, because I, like you, am an enemy of the cross of Christ; my end is destruction, my god is my belly, my glory is my shame, and my mind is set on earthly things.

     The word of the Lord comes to Abram in a vision, and the Lord says to Abram, "Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield." And Abram says, "O Lord God, what will you give me?" And what does the Lord give him, do you remember? The answer is nothing. Nothing but a promise. "Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you can." You will be the father of a sky full of stars. Look toward heaven, Abram, Sarai, Jane, Michael, Judy, Don. Can you see the heavenly city up there, the new Jerusalem that will come down from heaven adorned like a bride for her bridegroom? Can you see God living among mortals such as yourself, wiping away all their tears and taking away mourning and crying and pain and death?

     I don't know what Abram could see when the Lord told him to look toward heaven. All I know is that Abram gave God far more than God gave Abram in that encounter they had. Abram gave God his faith, or maybe I should say he received or discovered or accepted that faith, and maybe he only did it because he had no other choice. But whatever made him do it, he was at peace with it and he gave his life to it and his name became synonymous with faith to this day.

     Jerusalem means "city of peace." City of shalom. Tell that to the people who live in and around it right now, and they will quote to you Jeremiah's words of scorn for false prophets who cry "Peace, peace," when there is no peace. The name of the city is a measure of the horrendous distance from here to heaven.

     And then there is that other Jerusalem, that elusive faraway Jerusalem of which allegedly we are citizens. O Lord God, will you give us that Jerusalem in place of the one we have? What will you give us? Same question Abram asked. But when the Lord told him to look at the stars, the Lord was telling him to shut up and stop asking dumb questions. Stop behaving like a consumer and start being a disciple.

     After the fake carillon in our bell tower died, there were months when downtown Exeter heard no sound more sacred than the roar of an eighteen-wheeler rounding the bandstand or the hooting of the fire whistle. But now the Baptists have moved to fill the vacuum twice a day with their own carillon, which sounds even older than ours, and yesterday as I was composing these thoughts I heard it playing an old favorite, "I Love to Tell the Story," and the words ran through my head: "I love to tell the story, because I know 'tis true; it satisfies my longings as nothing else can do." And it came to me in a flash that the hymn has it entirely wrong. We are not here to have our longings satisfied. We are here to glorify and worship and serve God, and that is the path to the other Jerusalem, the city of peace, which God help us to find and to follow.