REV. JAMES C. HOWELL
Luke 15
September 11, 2016
I love these programs we've done in recent years where on Monday night, like tomorrow night, instead of me standing up and giving a lecture, I have a conversation with somebody who's interesting. The one tomorrow night will be absolutely amazing. You'll want to be here to see a conversation that I'll have with Molly Barker and we'll have a special guest that I'm going to surprise Molly with. It's going to be great. One of these that I did a number of years ago, I decided … a number of you came … to interview some people that I think of as especially holy; as people who are especially close to God to ask them like, "What is that? What's that like? What can we learn from you?" One of them was one of my former colleagues in ministry here that some of you may remember, the Rev. Alisa Lasater Wailoo. She left here and became the senior pastor of Capitol Hill United Methodist Church in Washington and she's just an amazing person. I remember we sat down for the interview; she had no idea what I was going to ask her about. And my first question was, "Alisa, tell us about God." I don't know how you would answer that. Alisa paused for a moment and she said, "When I think about God, I think about that parable in Luke 15 where Jesus talks about a woman who sweeps the floor and gets down on her hands and knees and searches and searches and searches and won't give up until she finds this one coin that she's lost. She says I think God's like that. God worries that there might be one of us that's lost. And God is just relentless; won't give up. Like this women sweeping the floor, looking, seeking, not giving up until that one is found."
I like that. God's numerical logic wouldn't really work well in the business world, would it, cause God's always concerned about the one. He had the shepherd; he's still got 99 sheep. I mean that's pretty good; you hung onto 99. Sheep are pretty dumb, they tend to wander off. But the shepherd is not happy because he's lost just one and he won't rest until he finds that one. The woman's still got some coins, but she won't rest until she finds that one coin. The nature of God.
Thinking of finding one coin … I'm so old I can remember some things some of you cannot. I can remember for instance when a penny actually was money. It actually represented some money. When I was a little kid I remember my allowance was 25 cents in a month so a penny was an amount of money. But it's not just that there was money, it was that they had this thing that used to happen. I think it's just fallen out of society. That as soon as you would find a penny, right, like somebody was getting change out of their pocket and they dropped a penny; and if you found that penny, it's not just that you had a little more money, the idea was like some good luck would come your way. You would find a penny and the sun would shine on you on that day. Finding a penny.
I love what Annie Dillard wrote about this. She talked about growing up in Pittsburgh and when she was six or seven years old here's what she used to do.
"I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore…or in a hole left by a chipped off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take piece of chalk and starting at either end of the blockdraws huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write, I labeled the arrows 'surprise ahead' or 'money this way'. I was greatly excited during allof this arrow drawing at the thought of the first lucky passerby who would receive in this way regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But … and this is the point … who gets excited by a mere penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days."
I love that. God has cast pennies around the world for us to find that will make our day. The problem is we don't value the penny any longer. We're looking for something else, for something bigger.
This is the day that we give Bibles to our third graders. Some of you know this, some of you don't. Each Bible … I don't know how this was decreed … it was decreed that each Bible should be autographed by me, yours truly. And I have it on good authority that on the resale market this increases the value of the Bible by two cents. So this year as I signed the Bibles I did this thing; I sent an email to all the parents of third graders and I said how can I pray for your child or for you? And I got some really interesting responses; it's amazing. A lot of families if you look at them, they're doing great, but they're actually struggling with some stuff at home, even with an eight year old. It was cool that people shared those things. So as I signed each Bible I prayed for each child or family, each situation. Somebody knew that I was doing this and said what you should do instead is text them little messages or some money in their Bibles as you sign them, right. Find an obscure passage, put a $5 bill in there; see how long it takes for them to find it, right? Or put a little note, you know, in the Psalms, like hey Andy, have a good day or whatever. I should have done that.
If … how shall we say it … the Bible is already studded and strewn with pennies from God, right? And so God has strewn all this stuff in there that will make your day, that'll blow your mind. The problem is we forget about that. We, we kind of go yeah, yeah, yeah, Bible is like taking your medicine. Or maybe it's like … you know Lisa and I flew, we were on a plane last night; we'd been on vacation. And when you get on a plane of course, somebody stands up and tells you what to do in case there's disaster on the plane. And nobody's listening; it's like yeah, yeah, yeah. The lights, the chute, nobody really listens to this stuff. It's like Bible, we kind of ignore it, but, but this is like God's great gift to us; it's God's mercy to us. You see the problem is, we're glad third graders get Bibles, but I think it's really a lesson for all of us that like God's given us this book and if it's worth giving to third graders, maybe worth actually all of us reading. And then how do we read it; we miss out, don't we? We look for the wrong stuff; we don't look for the right stuff.
When I was I seminary, my first day of seminary, I went to Duke Divinity School. I wasn't sure why I was there, I didn't have any real clear call to ministry. And I was 20 years old; I was the youngest person there. I just felt so lost. And so I go to my first class and it's on Old Testament which was a good place to begin. And the professor is this guy named Roland Murphy, who became kind of my lifelong adviser and mentor and very dear friend, but I didn't know him at the time. He was scary; he was 6-7, he had a big booming voice and he would wander the class talking, lecturing and then he called … why'd he pick me … he called on me. Like out of everybody in the room, like why? And he called on me, he'd met me, he knew my name. He said, "James!" And I said, "Yes, sir?" He said, "Is the Bible inspired?" I thought the answer was yes, so I said, "Yes." He said, "Why?" I don't know how you would handle that moment. I didn't know what the answer was; this was my first day of seminary. I was 20 years old, so I resorted to humor; I was proud of what I came up with on the spot. I said, "Well, I find that the Bible is inspired cause very often it agrees with what I think." Mild chuckle from the class, except there's a woman sitting across from me and this is in the early days of women being in seminary and it was a new thing and she didn't think I was funny at all. And she responded by saying, "Well, I disagree. I think the Bible is inspired at precisely those places where it disagrees with what I think." And people were "ooohh." But then my roommate bailed me out from the back of the room. He said, "Yeah, like those passages that say that women shouldn't speak in church?" You've wondered what seminary life is like … there it is.
She had a good point, right? The Bible … we do that right … we'll looking for stuff in the Bible that kind of agrees with what we think and when we find it we go, aahh, God is with me; but she's right, God would have us look for those things that disagree with what we think, that challenge where we are. And the Bible is full of this stuff and it's not there to stomp on your toes or something, it's there to give you a life. It's to keep you from being miserable and lonely and having a hollow existence. The Bible says stuff like don't covet. Like, you don't have to; you can be content. You don't have to want more stuff. The Bible says love your enemies which means you might actually be able to pull that off or God wouldn't have said to try it. The Bible says that judgment is mine, sayeth the Lord. You don't have to go around judging people. Like, what a relief, right. The Bible says don't lay up treasure on earth. You don't have to and it doesn't help anyway, does it? The Bible talks all about mercy, which means that God looks at you and knows you better than you know yourself and God has mercy on you. And therefore you can look at other people and you don't know what's going on with them and maybe they're getting on your nerves or you don't understand them, and you can have mercy on them too. The Bible, it's a challenge.
And then there's this other part about Bible stuff, right, is that it's actually something that you're supposed to do. Mother Teresa, I love this; this week she became a saint. She didn't actually become a saint this week; she's always been a saint. She just was officially proclaimed a saint by the church. I would have loved to have been in Rome for that when Pope Francis declared that Teresa of Calcutta is our newest saint. Mother Teresa was amazing and she came to Charlotte in 1995 and I took my third grader at the time, named Sarah, to the old Charlotte coliseum that since has been torn down, to see Mother Teresa. I didn't know if people would come. There are nineteen thousand people there and we come and we're singing all these Catholic hymns … yeah, they don't sing like Methodists but it was pretty good. We're singing Catholic hymns and then Mother Teresa came in and there was this buzz in the room. It was so exciting. And the cameras were up close in her face and they were up on the big wide screens. Sarah pulls on my arm and she says, "Daddy, she looks like somebody in the Bible." Think I like that.
Mother Teresa looked like somebody in the Bible in that when she read the Bible she thought this is what I'm supposed to do; this is like my playbook for today. This is my to-do list for today; whatever's in the Bible it must be pretty good stuff. I'll try to actually do these things. Maybe that's like a life mission for each one of us is that someday somebody will look at you and say wow, he looks like somebody in the Bible … she looks like somebody in the Bible.
This is not settling for these half-truths that we get in society and some of them are even religious right. And you hear these things and they're just not in the Bible and we shouldn't say them. I know they're well intended, but we shouldn't say them. People say things like oh God doesn't give you more than you can handle. Really? Really? That's not in the Bible. We say things like everything happens for a reason. That's not in the Bible. We say … I love this one … we say, I had a woman one time, she said, "The Bible says God helps those who help themselves." I said, "That is not, that's Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac. Sorry." And we, these half truths and they sound kind of true…but the Bible would blow our minds with something larger. It's full of the pennies that are spread, strewn by God, cast broadside by God's generous hand. And it's all been about this God who seeks us and is relentless and won't rest until God finds us, and then we go out and find people who are lost. The question is, who's lost? And you may in your heart be raising your hand saying, "I am." Like you got dressed this morning, well done, and you look good. I'm sure some people have asked you how are you doing and you just say fine; but somewhere inside there's this knot in you that says I'm kind of lost, I'm kind of confused, I'm kind of afraid. You need to be found; you need to find other people. Who needs to be found?
I thought about this. The anniversary of 9/11, 15 years ago we were all shocked by what happened. On that morning and, you know it was interesting, it was just such a week. And as I remember it, President Bush said, he decreed that on Friday of that week people should come to churches and pray. And I was the pastor in Davidson at the time and we had, it was like beyond Easter attendance. I mean everybody poured into the churches to pray. And that following Sunday, it was like more than Easter; the churches were packed. And everyone is predicting a great spiritual revival in our country. I don't mean to be pessimistic, but I predicted wrongly that that spiritual revival would be over in two weeks. It was actually over in one week. You see it shouldn't take something like that to rattle us so that we try to get serious about God and try to get serious about other people.
Imagine when you think about 9/11 you just think about it was that … I knew one guy who died in the World Trade Center, George Spencer; I've been to see his name there at the memorial. He was a lovely guy and what George did, he did like a lot of people that day. He phoned people who mattered to him and said what we ought to say to each other all the time. And then he said, "I'm working to try to get some people out of the next floor, so I've got to go." So, in those days, people were risking a lot of themselves to help somebody else, people they didn't even know. All this says to me is like we're capable of this. And the question is who's in the building that needs rescuing? And the answer is every building you ride by, every home in your neighborhood that you ride by, every building that you go by downtown or wherever you go, there are people in that building who are lost and need saving. There are people all over this world who are lost and need saving.
My daughter, Sarah, she occasionally will write a song. She's a good guitarist, singer, pianist and she writes songs sometimes. And she wrote a song this past week that really moves me; it's not a happy song. It's a sad song. It's addressed to little children that she does not know, but she'd seen their photos that went viral on the Internet. The first child … I hope you saw both these photos of these children. The first child was named Omran Daqneesh. Omran was the five year old who was found in the rubble of a destroyed building in Aleppo. Five years old. The other child that she saw was Alan Kurdi, who was three years old, whose body washed on shore in the Mediterranean trying to flee Syria to find a new life outside that very awful place. And her song to these two children says basically I weep for you and we're sorry. We created this world that you were born into and the implication of the song is like maybe we can do better. We can do better. We can create a world where children are safe and loved and it's all about us knowing the mind and heart of God. Not these half-truths that are about me and my self interests; that's what makes me sicker than anything else during the election cycle. People talk about candidates and everything and all they're talking about is me, what I want, what I want, what I want. God invites us to something larger, a more magnificent vision of being part of this great world that God has created with so much beauty and so many wonderful people in it. We can do better.