Beginning today and continuing over the next few weeks we will have a series of sermons that we hope will help us to explore some of those themes.

Transcription

1 The Hope that is in You: 1 Peter 3:13-22 Last month, some of us from here at First Pres Hickory (including many of us here this morning) enjoyed a weekend retreat together at Montreat Conference Center. The theme of the weekend, if you will recall, was Rethinking Church. The purpose of the retreat was to start us thinking together about how God might be calling us and calling First Presbyterian Church Hickory to DO church and BE church in the world we find around us today. The intent was not so much to answer the question there but rather, to get us thinking about it, hopefully seriously thinking it and talking about it, for it is an important and even crucial question that we and all faithful church communities need to wrestle with. We came home from the retreat with a number of topics or themes if you will that we will be exploring together in a variety of ways over the weeks and months and perhaps even years to come as we continue to listen for and try to discern God s call for this church and to discover ways, both new and old that we might faithfully respond. Beginning today and continuing over the next few weeks we will have a series of sermons that we hope will help us to explore some of those themes. Our guest speaker at the retreat, the Reverend Chris Henry described the culture we live in today as one of fractured polarity. It is a time, he says, when that which divides us seems to be greater than what unites us, and what were once (simply) differences of opinion have increasingly become reasons for ending friendships or (at least) for discontinuing communication. Some scholars refer to this as the big sort suggesting that we are increasingly self-segregated into enclaves of those who are most like us. Fractured polarity, you see, insists that our togetherness is dependent upon our sameness.

2 2 But the church, at its best, offers a different narrative, one in which we can be together but not the same and the truth is, the church may just be one of the few places today where we might experience such a message. The church, or at least when church is done well, is one of the few places in our culture today where people of different ages and different backgrounds, people of different theological beliefs and even different political passions can come together and hopefully create a safe and dare I say, even loving place where we can talk with rather than at each other and even more importantly where we can listen to each other and truly hear each other. Now I am not naïve. I know that when church is not done well it can be one of the greatest sorters of all. When church is not done well it can feed our prejudices and encourage us to judge and condemn and exclude those who are not like us or don t think or believe like us. I ve seen when church is not done well, and I suspect you have too and it is not a pretty thing. But I have seen church done well too and I trust, so have you; when people of differing backgrounds and concerns, people of different theological and political stripes eat at table together, serve in mission together, share in conversation together and join in worship together and help each other grow. And it is in the church done well that I choose to place my hope. But if the church is to offer an authentic and compelling alternate vision out there, then we are going to have to better understand just what it is, and we are going to have to better understand who each other is too so that we can embody and live out our vision together in community. And to do that may requires us to revive an ancient and sacred Christian practice. The practice of testimony. Now that word testimony tends to scare the begeezies out of most of us Presbyterians. But I think that is because we have infused it with so much unnecessary and frankly unhelpful baggage and expectations: that we get the words just right and the form just right and the theology just right.

3 3 But even if we do manage to spout the right words in the right form and the right theology, if it is not truly ours, if it does not make any real difference in how we think and live, then it is not testimony at all. It is just bad preaching! No, testimony at its heart and therefor at its best, is just about telling your story, telling your OWN story about -What brought you here, to church and what brought you to this place in your life? -What have you found here and what do you still hope to find or need to? -How has God, the church, your faith made you different than you would have been otherwise and how has it made a real and meaningful difference in how you live your life? And maybe even, as we get older, our testimony might be about what our whole life story has meant, or what it might mean and how we want the story to end. And the only valid standard for that kind of real testimony is that it be your story and that it be truthfully told. I, like many of you I suspect, grew up in the church. Church was always a central part of my life as a child. When I reached high school and the questions about what I wanted to be when I grew up became more serious, all I knew was that I wanted my life to mean something. I wanted to be of some good in this world. Now I knew lots of good people who did lots of good things but the only one I saw who made a living at it was the preacher. So I decided that that must be my call. And so, after high school I went off to college and majored in philosophy and religion. In my senior year I began to search for a seminary to attend for what else are you going to do with a BA in philosophy and religion. I grew up Methodist and I wanted to have an adventure and live someplace different than I was familiar with and so I applied and was accepted at St. Paul School of Theology Methodist in Kansas City Missouri. 4

4 In seminary, I found that I was much more drawn to pastoral care than to preaching and so fortuitously, I took two chaplaincy internships at a large hospital in downtown Kansas City. At the end of each year all the students at St Paul had to write a lengthy and detailed credo, a statement of our beliefs. It was essentially a fifty or sixty-page faith statement. At the end of the first year there I cranked out that credo with enthusiasm. After all, I had been in the church all my life, I had a bachelor s degree in philosophy and religion and I now had a year of seminary under my belt. I couldn t wait to eloquently and accurately espouse the faith. It was beautiful. But as I began to prepare for writing my credo the second year, it all felt different somehow. The ideas that I had been exposed to and the experiences I had had in seminary had caused me to question things that I had never thought to question. I read book after book and I made copious notes on numerous 3 by 5 cards. Finally, the time came when I could put it off no longer and I sat down one evening at my typewriter to begin. (Yes, this way proceeded computers) I rolled a fresh sheet of paper into place. I arranged my note cards on the desk beside me. I looked at the blank sheet of paper. I rearranged the note cards. I placed my fingers on the keys and I began. I believe, I typed and there I paused. I stared at the paper. I rearranged my note cards. I stared at the paper again. I put my fingers back on the keys. I believe, I read back to myself and in that moment, I knew that there was not one word I could type after that that I knew to be true. Anything and everything that I might say I believed was merely me reciting back what someone told me I SHOULD believe. 5

5 All the faith my parents had taught me since birth, all the things the church had told me, all the religious concepts I had learned in college and seminary and I knew in that moment that I did not believe any of it. And furthermore, all my hopes and plans for the future were now gone too and I had no plan B. I took the paper from the typewriter, turned off the light and spent a nearly sleepless night trying to figure out what I was going to do. The next morning, I met with my adviser and after a difficult and sometimes tearful conversation, I decided that I would have to leave seminary and try to sort things out. My wife and I moved to Charlotte and I worked in a warehouse for a time. We did a year of volunteer work at a hospital in the mountains of Puerto Rico. I came back and returned to school, this time to complete my master s in social work degree. When I left seminary, I left church too and for nearly 2 decades I rarely thought about faith and I almost never attended church. I didn t want to reopen that door. And besides, I was being successful in my carrier, I had a good marriage, two terrific kids. I didn t need that stuff anymore. Everything was just fine in my life. Until the day came when everything was not fine in my life. My wife of 20 years left, leaving me a part time single dad of two young sons. My work at a clinic I had helped start began to go sour and I knew that it was only a matter of time before I would have to leave. I was lost and confused and had no idea where to turn. But then somehow deep down within me something like an old voice began to speak. Maybe to find the answers you are seeking, it said, you are going to have to go back, back to where you left off. I was doubtful, but it was the only hope I could find. I started visiting churches, tentatively and reluctantly at first. I met a very special young lady named Shawn and I started attending a Presbyterian church with her. I began to attend Sunday school and study groups. I started reading, even dug out some of my old seminary texts. 6

6 And over time, things began to change for me. For the first time in my life, I began to see, I mean truly see, how God was working in and through all the tumult around me and I began to develop my own true faith. And then one day I heard that the chaplain position was open at the hospital where I was working. Since I had not finished seminary and was not an ordained pastor, I didn t bother to even apply. But then a one of the Vice Presidents there remembered that I had taken chaplaincy training while in seminary and came to me and asked if I would be interested in transitioning into the chaplain position. For some reason, they thought I would be good at it. I jumped at the opportunity, completed the Commissioned Lay Pastor program and am now beginning my 17 th year as a hospital chaplain, back where I began so long ago. You know, 45 years have passed now since that night when I pulled the near blank sheet of paper out of the typewriter, turned out the light and walked away from all my plans and hopes for the future. I was convinced for a long time that that was the end of any testimony I might have. And yet, as I look back on it now, it was not the end of my testimony but was actually the beginning of MY testimony, the one that belongs to me, the one that can be truthfully told. At a difficult time in my life, I thought I had lost all hope. But it was when I returned to church and the faith of my childhood, that I found my hope, the one that Peter called the hope that is in you. The one that had been there all along, but I just couldn t see it, I just couldn t hear it. But as writer Tom Long says, the church is about vision and hearing, it gives us new eyes and ears, and a new vocabulary allowing us to listen afresh and speak what we could not have said before. 7

7 To see and hear differently, Long says, is to live differently, to have the ways we think and feel, make decisions and act as Christians transformed. We in the church, need to help each other to discover our own story, our own testimony. The one that can be truthfully told. So often, we don t think much about even having a story. We mostly focus on the business around us each day. But we need to foster opportunities to go deep and discover our own true story and to claim it and to figure out what it means, and therefore what our life means. And if we discover that it is not the story we want, then it s not over till it s over and we are always writing the next chapter. Yes, we in the church need to help each other to discover our own true stories and we need to share them with each other too so that we can get to know each other better and understand each other better and so that we can know that we are not alone. But ultimately, we need to learn to tell our story, our testimony, if we dare use the word, out there, for God knows they need to hear it too.