Day 1694 - If we owe them anything, we owe them everything

A sermon shared with First Presbyterian Church, Spring City, TN on July 30, 2017

1 Kings 3:5-12

Romans 8:26-39

Isn’t “Who is to condemn us?” a very presumptuous question? It is easy to take Paul’s celebratory words about the blessing of having our prayers heard, even the ones we cannot voice in words as our own blessing. Surely they are words of relief aimed at us, we the ones who are caring, worrying, crying, and rejoicing in a world that seems to be full of meanness, loss of hope, or acceptance of a spiritual and financially impoverished existence because they haven’t seen one of plenty to know there is another kind of life.

Here is the problem.

Many of the people we meet, or are acquainted seem to fall into those three categories (Read the newspaper, watch the TV news, or the internet). Those three worlds can easily bleed on to us and beat us down, or recruit us. That reality cries out for relief.

It may surprise you to know that this is not a new situation.

John Calvin shaped early Presbyterian thought. He lived in the first half of the 1500’s in a time of transition to commerce and capitalism from a pre-literate society predominately consisting of cities and towns of 50-500. (The largest city in all of Europe was Constantinople of about 400,000 people.)

The church was usually the only prominent building in a village among houses with dirt floors and no windows in order to keep out the cold. People were expected to attend church, yet mysticism, astrology and superstition and despair were the norm. The good thing about being more or less forced to attend church services was that since about 95% of the people were illiterate, the only news they got beyond rumors was in oral sermons.

Calvin's age of emerging modern commerce magnified the economic separation of the 5% who were literate and making money from everyone else who tilled the soil for the things that were sold.

Depending on the country, the majority of farm workers were legally in servitude on a few manors, or entered willingly into indenture. Hostility, peasant revolts, crime and of course, contagious diseases swept the land. The economic disparity is almost the same now as then, we all just have more things.

This human landscape shaped John Calvin’s ideas about righteousness and salvation. He concluded only a few “good” people lived among this hoard of evil in the world.

In 1935, a well-known theologian named Richard Niebuhr surveyed the Church in America and world-wide industrial society after the insanity of World War I and under the rising storm clouds of Nazism and a coming new World War that seemed to threaten Christendom. His conclusion was bleak  but honestly, his assessment of the Church was not that different from Calvin's assessment of the Universal (Catholic) Church.

He concluded in spite of all its good, the Church had failed in its mission to be a light with the good news in society and often had been an instrument of harm, allaying with power and cultural prejudice. He said one only had to read the newspapers to see proof of the failure of the Church in society.

Today we might say, one only has to search the cable news programs, or comments by thespokesperson for the POTUS  to see the proof.

I’m not here to complaint loudly against society, or descend into political arguments or movements. We don’t have the time to talk about why we are in this state of affairs.

Let’s just accept the truth Paul observed 2,000 years ago, that we are under assault, and the reality Calvin observed 500 years ago that the Church in society is terribly broken, and the assessment of Richard Niebuhr 83 years ago that the Reformed Church has stumbled badly, and our own experiences in life today that reveal widespread misery.

In this brief time sermon, what I’d like to do is begin an effort to sort out what this passage in Romans means for us, because 83 years after Richard Niebuhr made his indictment of the modern Church with the question, ‘What must the Church do to save itself?,” we should all see local examples that convince us the question is true and valid.

There are so many examples. Here is one. I continue to work with a middle-aged man in Chattanooga that began four years ago, a few days after he was discharged from jail. He has probably been incarcerated for as much as, if not more than half his years.

He told me that he had been using drugs and alcohol as long as he could remember. As a middle-schooler and teen, he relied on bad relationships, including his own family to take care of him when he was in trouble or worried. They gave him alcohol and drugs. He has significant mental difficulties, as did his parents being bipolar and having an anti-social personality (That means he has no sense of authority, or obligation to be truthful). How much of his mental difficulties are caused by his drug and alcohol use or the reverse is a universally unanswered question.

The painful facts are that alcohol/drug abuse, mental illness and crime are an interlinked problem in our modern society.

Experts say that a person’s mental faculties are frozen at the time they begin a significant drug or alcohol abuse. This fellow shows it, he makes decisions as if he was a middle schooler who never had any family to learn right from wrong or think about future consequences of immediate acts.

Whether in Spring City, or Chattanooga, or Atlanta, I see folks who desperately need medical care but have no resources to pay for it. They skip a day or two, or more, each week on their meds, put off seeing the doctor at the clinic, and neglect physical illness. I cannot understand that we deny medical care and counseling for those who cannot pay for justifiable reasons in a wealthy society.

I know of parents and young people here in this area that have similar stories. Some parents seem absolutely mean to the core and offer that meanness as an ideal for their children. I know of grandparents who ache for the life of their abused grandchildren. I know young children who are growing up to accept that a life of hunger and emotional neglect is the norm. I know of parents who likely never experienced it themselves and inexplicably resent our effort to help their children. They tell their children never to talk to us, and make it clear to us not to do so either. A poor teenager hanged himself rather than continue in a desperate family and foster care situation. It troubles me the event made almost no public visibility, as if the intent of authorities is to hush it up.

I pick up the newspaper and read punctilious editorials claiming poverty is all the poor person’s fault. They just need to get an education, a job, or stop drinking, or using drugs. One editorialist suggested that she did not believe there were people for whom a sudden $500 expense was an insurmountable emergency. Talk about being out of touch.

It cuts me to the heart. Sometime I understand and feel my mother’s overwhelming anger when she said the way some people treat family (and people) made her want to chew nails. At other times, I feel so helpless that I just want to sit down and weep.

You see, in this world of ours, our youth are our future, they are the only thing between now and when the Kingdom is fulfilled. Our youth are our only hope for the future because they will soon be the ones to whom we pass the baton. They will shape the world according to the values we teach them. They will govern, they will love us or they will hate us. If we owe them anything, we owe them everything. (Do I sound like CSN?)

Every person in this congregation (that I call a representative of the world) knows that is true because you all make every effort to treat every person who enters our door as your family.

The crisis in America, if not the world, is that many young people are growing up alone and under siege. They must figure out their ethos according to their observation of us and what they learn from family and school.

Everyone in this room may not realize that eight of us are working through a process that I call a “Working for the Future” to bring to our congregation a plan for our “sailboat” church (something Richard Niebuhr also talked about).
 What does "Working for the Future" mean? It means we are in the same state Richard Niebuhr observed. We care about the future of our congregation and about the future of the Church itself.

It means we have knowingly or unknowingly stumbled upon and understand Richard Niebuhr’s question, “What must the Church do to save itself?” as an existential call to action by this congregation for the salvation of the Church in the world. The Church, at least in the Northern Hemisphere suffers a crisis of faith. It is full of people backbiting and arguing about interpretation overlooking, or ignoring a whole world outside simmering in distress hostility, while the very foundation of the institution of the Church itself erodes in a loss of faith in what it is called to be. Whether you call it Judaism or Christianity, the same thing is occurring.

We are drawn to this very point, as we struggle to fulfill our purpose that glorifies the Lord here in Spring City. As we struggle to rebuild ourself, we also rebuilding the Church at large.

What shall we do? We are so painfully aware of Paul’s acknowledgement of our weakness, “we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words…”

Friends do you understand those words? We are drawn to a universal crisis of the Church, “We must pray for the empowerment to be a source of hope for our youth in this world of meanness, despair and loss of hope for a better world.” So, what then are we to say about these things?

Paul said, “If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against us? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died. As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

In my worry over all the sadness and difficulty I see, I take heart in the words and ideas coming from our working group and its direction. If God is with us, I invite you all to pray with our working group, pray without ceasing listening to the Spirit, that we all will be that light on a hill for the glory and the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Let people say what they will. Who is to condemn us for seeking to be a light in a world of hurt?

Amen