| Sermon for Sunday, October 31, 2004 I Will Bless You So That You Can Be A Blessing!by Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz Consecration Sunday Scripture: Genesis 12:1-2
1 Now the Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.
Like some of you I was able last week to vote early and I chose to do that. As I voted I thought about what a sacred act that is, what an important privilege that is to vote, to indicate my support for policies and positions and leaders that I think and hope are good for our country and our world. In voting I had a chance to express my support for those policies and those directions and those programs. And… I also thought that day as I left the polling place that today’s worship service is very similar to what I did in the voting booth. Today you and I get a chance to vote as well, to express the degree with which we believe in and support the work that God gives us to do, to say with our promises of PRAYERS, PRESENCE, GIFT AND SERVICE how important God’s work really is, really is, in our lives. This is one of the days that the rubber meets the road in our response to the promise Jesus tells us in the sermon on the mount, that when we put God at the center of our lives, that the things we need and typically worry about will fall into place. What difference does your commitment of prayers, presence, gifts and service make; what good does it do to support the work of any church or this church? Let me tell you a couple of stories about how important this is. Grace Thomas was born in Alabama and raised in the Southern Baptist Church. When she married she and her husband moved to Atlanta where she enrolled in a law school that offered night classes so she could attend after she got off work from her office job. All this was happening in the 1950’s so Grace was one of those pioneers among women leaders in America not only in being a female attorney in that time but also in how she decided to use her law degree; she decided she would run for governor of Georgia! She was one of nine candidates for governor that year and the year she ran, 1954, was the year that the US Supreme Court decided that segregated schools were unconstitutional and illegal. Grace Thomas said in her campaigning that the court was right and that segregationists were wrong. Her position was extremely unpopular in the south in that time and she came in deal last in the governor’s race. Her family was relieved she had gotten those crazy ideas out of her system. But she really had not given up and in 1962 she ran for governor again in Georgia and her candidacy was just as controversial. The civil rights movement was gaining momentum and she received death threats for her support of equal rights for every person. Her family traveled with her every day on the campaign trail for protection and moral support. One day she was appearing in the small Georgia town of Louisville. The centerpiece of the town was not a courthouse or war memorial but an old slave market where human beings had been bought and sold – a tragic and evil place. Grace Thomas chose that site for her campaign speech. She stood there as a hostile crown of storekeepers and farmers gathered to hear her. She began with this quote: “The old has passed away and the new has come.” She said, “This old site of a slave market represents our past which we must repent. A new day is here now when Georgians, both black an white, can join hands to work together.” This was dangerous talk in the south in 1962 and the crowd was hostile and murmuring. Some shouted, “Are you a communist?” Grace paused in her speech. “No, I am not,” she said softly. The heckler continued, “Well, where did you get all those gol durned ideas?” Grace Thomas thought for a moment and pointed to a nearby church steeple and said, “I got them over there, in Sunday School.” Well, of course she did. That’s what people learn in Sunday School and church, to be compassionate, to love one another, to do justice and practice kindness and walk humbly with God and not to discriminate. It is a dangerous and risky thing – to teach people right from wrong, but that is what we are doing here in church – instilling a moral and ethical compass and reinforcing that compass. An when you and I bring our commitment card to this altar table, we are supporting that work of teaching right from wrong and teaching people to stand for compassion and liberty and justice for all – for all. Do you believe that is a good thing to support? Do you want to support that kind of ethical work with your prayers, presence, gifts, and service? Let me share another story from a professor at our United Methodist seminary in Atlanta. Professor Tom Long tells about a time he was in a group of church folks who were talking about times in their lives when God felt very real and very close. One young woman in the group was a professional dancer who had grown up in that church. She talked about being baptized there in the sanctuary and how her father would tell her about that and how he told her what hymns were sung and what the sermon was about and he would end the story by saying to her that on her baptismal day, the Spirit of God was really present in the church. She said that as a child, she would go to church with her parents and would look around the sanctuary and wonder, “Where is God’s spirit in this building?” She would look at the organ pipes and the stained glass windows and the sanctuary beams and wonder to herself, “Is that where God’s spirit is?” She paused in her story and every one in the group leaned forward to hear her. She said, “As many of you know, I lost both my parents to cancer in the same week last winter. It was a terrible. And during that terrible, terrible week, on a dark Wednesday afternoon, I was driving home from the hospital where I had visited both of my parents and I was passing by the church and I felt an intense need to pray. I came into the church and sat in one of the back pews and began to pray. The church was dark, and in the shadows I prayed and poured by grief out to God and just cried from the bottom of my heart. And a member of the church who was in the kitchen preparing a meal for a church meeting saw me praying a knew what was happening in my life and took off her apron and came and sat beside me in the pew and held my hand and prayed there with me. And it was then that I knew where the spirit of God was in this church.” We could tell many stories like that about people in this congregation who have found comfort and solace and encouragement and strength in this place as well. The commitment of your prayers and presence and gifts and service in a few minutes at the altar table will not only help that happen for those of us who are here but for others who need to be here to experience what we have. We will be able to expand this ministry of care and belonging and compassion for others. One more thing. Next Sunday we will be remembering and honoring those who have died in the past year or so in our All Saints Day service – our annual service of remembrance and thanksgiving here in this sanctuary. There are details in the bulletin for letting us know of people you want us to include in that service. How important is it to you that we have a chance to give thanks in a public way for the lives of those who have been important to us? How important is it to have a congregation where that ministry of grief can happen and be encouraged? How important is it to have a place, in the words of Ken Medema, where we can bring our tears and our memories and they are honored and received and accepted and recognized? Your pledge card will help that critical ministry continue. When we fill out these cards at the end of our worship service and sing, “Here I am Lord” it will be a new step of faith for some people. Some of us will be moving from being consumers of religion to becoming disciples of Christ. Some of us will begin to tithe for the first time; to return to God 10% of what God as blessed us with. Some of us will be growing from spectators and recipients of ministry to participants. That is a very important thing. It is like the old Flip Wilson joke he told about describing his religious preference as “Jehovah’s bystander.” He said they asked him to be a Jehovah’s witness but he wasn’t ready to be that committed and involved! To promise to God a percentage of one’s resources may be a sign that some of you are ready to change from being bystanders to participants and followers of Christ. In fact, some of our members who met a couple of times in September to think a bit about how we maximize the resources in this very blessed congregations said it this way: it was when you took a leap of faith in your giving and trusted more the word’s of Jesus in the sermon on the mount – put God at the center of your life and then – and THEN – all that stuff you worry about will fall into place – that is when you own spiritual life really began to make some progress! Do you believe that? Are you willing to give that a try to see if it works? This can be the day for you to make that decision! God told Abraham that God would bless Abraham so that Abraham could then be a blessing to other people. God has done that for us as well and today’s worship service is one of the ways that we live that out. Thanks be to God. |
