Sermons from The Church of the Covenant

Transcription

1 March 1, 2015 Seven Deadly Sins Series: Sloth Sermons from The Church of the Covenant Whatever The Reverend Amy Starr Redwine The Church of the Covenant Presbyterian Church (USA) Euclid Avenue Cleveland, Ohio CovenantWeb.org

2 Hebrews 12:1-3, Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners, so that you may not grow weary or lose heart. Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed. Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.

3 Whatever Seven Deadly Sins Series: Sloth Hebrews 12:1-3, In Maurice Sendak s book for children called Pierre, the title character is a boy who says only one thing: I don t care. Good morning, my darling boy! his mother greets him. You are my only joy. I don t care, says Pierre. What would you like to eat? I don t care. Some lovely cream of wheat? I don t care. Don t sit backwards on your chair. I don t care. Or pour syrup in your hair. I don t care. And on it goes. Pierre doesn t care about going into town, he doesn t care about getting scolded by his father. He just. Doesn t. Care. He doesn t even care when a lion shows up at his house and asks Pierre if he d like to die. I don t care, is all he has to say. So the lion eats him. Fortunately, for Pierre, he is not a real child, he is a storybook character, which means that when his parents rush the lion into town where a doctor shakes him up and down, Pierre drops right out of the lion s mouth, not a scratch on him. The last line of the book is simply: The moral of Pierre is: CARE! 1 The problem is, when we are feeling in a particularly I don t care kind of way, there are few things that can really shake us out of it. You know the feeling. Sometimes it comes upon us when we are tired when we have journeyed too far or worked too hard or waited too long so we just stop caring. Sometimes it comes upon us when we are overworked the to do list is so long that it induces a kind of paralysis that causes us not to care about any of it. Sometimes it comes upon us when we are overwhelmed when we have read or heard so many reports of violence or racism or terrorism that we just can t take it in and care. And sometimes this feeling of I don t care comes upon us for no discernible reason whatsoever. Pierre.

4 This is how it happened to the writer Kathleen Norris, when she felt this kind of existential apathy for the first time at age fifteen. One minute she was a relatively happy, if self-absorbed, teenager; the next she suddenly felt the future stretching out before her as an appalling, interminable progression of empty days to fill. Later, as an adult, she stumbled upon the concept of acedia, a condition the Desert mothers and fathers believed was the precursor to the deadly sin of sloth. They described acedia as a state of restlessness, of feeling overwhelmed to the point of being unable or unwilling to act. When Kathleen Norris discovered this ancient concept she realized that this was the condition that had haunted her for years. It wasn t depression, although there were certainly similarities, it was more of a spiritual, soulful apathy. A deep uncaring. A cosmic whatever. Over time, she writes, I have come to believe that [this condition] can strike anyone whose work requires self-motivation and solitude, anyone who remains married for better for worse, anyone who is determined to stay true to a commitment that is sorely tested in everyday life. 2 The New Testament letter to the Hebrews was written to a community whose commitment was being sorely tested. The writer of this letter was offering a word of encouragement to those who had grown discouraged. And no wonder! The earliest Christian communities were convinced that Jesus earthly return was imminent. And this wasn t just wishful thinking: it was based on things that Jesus himself had said! Jesus exhortations to stay awake and be alert. Parables about paying attention and being ready. It was enough to make many of them sell their possessions, give up their jobs, and join a community of like-minded believers. But then nothing happened. Day after day after day, nothing changed. Those who had eagerly accepted jobs that needed to be done in the beginning you know, someone to keep the babies quiet in one room while everyone else gathered to prayer; someone to stay in the kitchen and make the coffee and cookies for people to eat when the prayers were done; someone to oversee the building and grounds. They took these jobs eagerly in the beginning, thinking that they were only committing for a month or two a few years at the most. Because Jesus was coming back!

5 But then he didn t come back. And those jobs that were supposed to be temporary, they just went on and on and on, with the same people doing them. And those people started to get weary. Bored, even. Existentially tired. And some of them drifted away. There was a young woman in a church, who had gone through a terribly painful time. She had gotten married and had a child, but the child died before his second birthday. Her husband couldn t handle the emotional demands of her grief and, just when she needed him most, he divorced her. But then, over time, it seemed as though she had gotten back on her feet, as we like to say. She got a job, she seemed to be holding it together. Then, one Sunday morning at the end of the worship service as the last hymn was winding down and the pastor was gearing up for the benediction, she walked down the aisle toward the front of the church. The people were so excited she s going to rededicate her life to Jesus! they thought. But when the music stopped, she turned to face this little congregation and announced, Today, I wish to un-join the church. She went on, I don t know if there is a ceremony for this, but I want you to know that all the things that once attracted me to this church no longer exist. I don t believe a word of it. And with that, she left. It took the minister a few minutes to come up with a benediction after that, and the people in the pews had no idea what to do. Someone had just UNJOINED their church! The woman didn t realize that there is no ceremony for leaving the church, there is no announcement to be made. Everyone else knew what she did not: to union the church, you just stop showing up, quit giving, and drop out; the most you do is maybe mutter something to an acquaintance over shopping carts at Heinen s. At the end of the service, the woman s leaving was all people could talk about. Most were heard to say, Well, it s none of my business! It s her decision, let her go! How could you blame her anyway, after all she s been through? And, I don t go running after anybody! 3 Who Cares

6 Well, it is safe to say that the author of the letter to the Hebrews would have taken that congregation to task. Because he knows that when people are faltering, they need to know, first and foremost, that someone cares. This whole letter is an attempt to encourage those who are faltering in their faith and in their commitment to their community. The urgent point this letter is trying to make is that what God has done in Jesus Christ is worth sticking around for. It is the most amazing thing to happen yet in the whole history of God s people! And what a history! The author starts with Abraham and details the incredible perseverance of many of the ancestors of our faith. This is the letter we turn to on All Saints Sunday when we are remembering those who have gone before us: Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith This letter was written to this particularly community because of one crucial thing: the author cares. He cares deeply about this community of Christians and he wants them to stick with their faith even in the face of their weariness, their acedia, their spiritual apathy, their cosmic whatever. He cares about them and he cares enough to do something about it, to put pen to paper and put the paper in the post and make sure they know someone cares. Nicholas Kristoff is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and a veteran reporter who has traveled and lived all over the world. At the height of the terrible conflict in Darfur, he traveled to that region multiple times and wrote impassioned columns about what he saw there: mass violence, people driven from their homes, children massacred, women raped...but it seemed as though no matter what he wrote his columns didn t seem to make an impact, they just disappeared without a ripple. At about that same time, there was a red-tailed hawk in New York City that was essentially evicted from its home atop an apartment building. It seemed the entire city was infuriated that this hawk had been forced from its home. Why, Kristoff wondered, why wasnʼt there the same level of outrage for the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Darfur as for this homeless bird? Thatʼs when Kristoff came across a series of studies by Paul Slovic about what motivates people to give to humanitarian causes. He writes, A classic experiment involved asking people to donate to help hungry children in West Africa. One group was asked to help a seven-year-old girl named Rokia, in the country of Mali. A

7 second was asked to donate to help millions of hungry children. A third was asked to help Rokia but was provided with statistical information that gave them a larger context for her hunger. Not surprisingly, people donated more than twice as much to help Rokia as they did to help millions of children. But it turned out that even providing background information on African hunger diminished empathy, so people were much less willing to help Rokia when she represented a broader problem. Donors didn't want to help ease a crisis personified by a child; they just wanted to help one person 4 The same reason people are so much more eager to help one person, is what makes many Christian communities so good at caring. Because we know each other. When someone who s been coming to church starts to drift away, someone else ought to notice. And when we notice, we ought to do something. Last week, when we talked about the sin of gluttony, I suggested that the antidote to gluttony, to taking too much for ourselves, is community. The antidote for the sin of sloth, the sin of whatever, is action. But it s not just any action, it s action in the context of community. It s doing something, however small that something might be, that will impact the life of another human being. It s doing something to show that we care. It might be showing up on a Saturday afternoon at church to provide a reception after a funeral, like some of our deacons did yesterday, even though they may not have known anyone who came to the service. It might be packing lunches for homeless women and children, like our parent and children s group did last night. It might be calling someone you don t know well but you ve noticed they haven t come to worship in a few weeks and you just want them to know that someone noticed, that someone cares whether they are here or not. It might be saying yes when someone from the Nominating Committee calls to ask you to serve as an elder or a deacon or a trustee, or it might be saying no because you ve done enough of that kind of caring and now you want to care in some other way. My friend Mark served as a hospital chaplain one summer in a hospital, and while he was there he visited a patient who, even though he was a churchgoer, didn t think much of clergy, and he thought even less of the church. My church doesn t care anything for me, he liked to say, another name, another pledge. It s just a big racket, another name, another pledge.

8 The man went home after a couple of days, but later that summer, he was back in the hospital. When Mark went to see him, the change was shocking. He was down to 91 pounds and the cancer in his lungs made it hard for him to breathe and almost impossible for him to speak. But this time, when Mark went in the room, the room had been transformed. Every square inch of space the window sill, the table next to his bed, the tray that swings out over the bed for your food every inch was covered with flowers and cards, and all of them were from people and groups at his church. The man couldn t speak, but he gestured for Mark to read something he scribbled on the side of a kleenex box. What is it? Mark asked. On the box the man had written, I was wrong. He was wrong. 5 If you are stuck and feeling particularly unmotivated or overwhelmed, you ve come to the right place, because I can think of no better place to overcome the sin of whatever than church. Here, we exist, to care. Because the church at any time and in any place only exists at all because God cares. With the incarnation, in Jesus, God has shown once and for all the incredible depth of God s caring for the world and for each one of us and God has shown the lengths God will go to reveal to us that love and care. When we truly wrap our heads around the depth and breadth of God s caring, it simply isn t possible for us to respond, whatever. The only response to that is to do whatever we can to take that love, that acceptance, that care wherever and to whomever it is needed most. Amen. Ibid.

9 11205 Euclid Avenue Cleveland, Ohio CovenantWeb.org Convinced of God's grace, the Church of the Covenant strives to be a caring and compassionate congregation, welcoming all people regardless of age, race, national origin, marital status, gender, affectional orientation, and mental or physical ability.