SunJul122009
Scripture: Psalm 1
Psalm 1:1-6 ( NLT ) Oh, the joys of those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or stand around with sinners, or join in with mockers. But they delight in the law of the LORD, meditating on it day and night. They are like trees planted along the riverbank, bearing fruit each season. Their leaves never wither, and they prosper in all they do.
But not the wicked! They are like worthless chaff, scattered by the wind. They will be condemned at the time of judgment. Sinners will have no place among the godly. For the LORD watches over the path of the godly, but the path of the wicked leads to destruction.
Psalm 1:3 [People who seek God] are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.
Sometimes you never know how something you have done or said has touched the life of another person. One day this past winter a major snowstorm hit northeast Ohio. As conditions deteriorated, church staff went home early that day. I got home late in the afternoon and with some difficulty was able to get my car up the driveway and into the garage. I changed clothes, returned to the garage and fired up the new 2-stage snowblower I had purchased from Lowes at the beginning of the season.
In fairly short order I cleared the foot or more of snow from my driveway. I then blew the snow from the sidewalk in front of our house and the sidewalks of the neighbors on either side of us. I was finishing up, when a neighbor kitty-cornered across the street arrived home from work. As she tried to pull into her drive, her car became stuck in the deep snow that the snowplow had piled in the approach to her driveway.
I watched as she rocked the car back and forth, first trying to drive in and then trying to back out. It was all to no avail. The car was stuck. After a minute or two she left her car partially in the street and partially in her driveway and trudged through the snow to her garage. As she retrieved a snow shovel and headed back to the street, I pointed the snowblower in the direction of her stranded car.
With her at the wheel and me pushing on the front of her car, we were able to get it out of the snowdrift and back onto the street. I suggested she park it in my recently cleared driveway. Meanwhile, I cleared the entrance to her driveway and a path wide enough for her to get her car into her garage.
I thought nothing more of it. Winter turned into spring and spring into summer. The other day I was sitting in our living room, when the doorbell rang. I opened the door and was surprised to see the neighbor from across the street. Her voice filled with gratitude, she said, “Last winter you helped me, when my car got stuck as I was trying to get in my driveway.” She held out her hand and in it was a bag of freshly picked lettuce from her garden. “Thank you,” she said.
Often you may never know how some small act of kindness has touched the life of another person. The Psalmist alludes to it in our scripture this morning. People who delight in God, who seek to get close to God, are like trees planted by streams of water, he says. Their leaves do not wither and they yield fruit in its season.
The world can be such a desolate and barren place. The desolation we experience is often caused by circumstances beyond our control. War continues to afflict our world with pain and death and loss. This morning our country is deeply involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I opened the newspaper earlier this week to the news that 7 U.S. servicemen had been killed in Afghanistan the previous day.
We are in an economic downturn, the likes of which has not been seen since the Great Depression. Job loss and home foreclosures are at epidemic levels. The financial foundations of many have been rocked by the precipitous fall of U.S. and world equity markets. Major corporations are filing for bankruptcy. States across the country, including our own, are struggling to balance their budgets.
I was talking with the neighbor directly across the street from us the other day. I noticed that their daughter was home. She graduated from college in 2007 and for the past two years has been an elementary school teacher in Florida. “It must be nice having your daughter home,” I said. “It is,” the neighbor replied, “except that her teaching position along with those of 60 others in her system was cut. Now she is looking for a new job and considering going back to graduate school.” That scene is being played out across the country these days.
As I have submerged myself in the Psalms in recent months, I have been struck by how many of them fluctuate between despair and hope. Because of his faith in God, however, the Psalmist almost always ends on a note of hope. Psalm 3 begins, “O Lord, how many are my foes,” and ends with “Deliverance belongs to the Lord....” Psalm 5 begins, “Give heed to my sighing, O Lord,” and concludes “You cover the righteous as with a shield.”
The Psalmist doesn’t pretend that life is always easy, that there will never be trials and hard places. What sustains him is the conviction that God will not abandon him in the dark and difficult times. “Even when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me,” he prays in the familiar words of Psalm 23. In the barren times, in the desert places, that is where God is often found.
Most of you know that I grew up in western Washington state. The terrain is hilly and the climate cool and moist much of the year. Eastern Washington is another story. Were it not for the Columbia River and water provided by the Grand Coulee Dam, much of eastern Washington would be a dessert. When I was a child, my family made frequent trips on the White Pass, over the Cascade Mountain Range to Yakima, a city in eastern Washington, where extended family lived.
The Tieton River, fed by water from the Cascades flows down the eastern side of the mountain range along Highway 12. As you descend into eastern Washington the climate becomes abruptly dryer. The evergreen trees begin to disappear. Before long you find yourself in dry, barren, rocky country with scrub brush and a few scrawny trees here and there. What is interesting, though, is that a strip of green follows the Tieton River as it flows into the eastern part of the state. No matter how dry and desolate the terrain may become, that strip of green vegetation and life is always there.
When I read Psalm 1, the image that comes to mind is of the Tieton River in eastern Washington, an image of trees alive and vital because they are planted by a life-giving river. It is the place where we, who are God’s people, are called to be. I spoke about that last week when I focused on those words from Psalm 46, “There is a river, whose streams make glad the city of God.” Those of you who were here will recall that I spoke of that river, the stream of God’s spirit, as a life-giving stream and one that is inexhaustible and ever-present.
Not only are we as followers of Jesus nurtured by the life-giving water, we also become channels for it. The well known prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi talks about it, who we are as Christians (instruments of God’s peace) and what we are called to do: "Where there is hatred, sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy."
The list of attributes parallels quite closely the fruit of the Spirit that Paul mentions in his letter to the Galatian Christians. Earlier in the service Peg read Eugene Peterson’s rather earthy translation of the passage.
In his book, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes of our role as Christians in the world: "...the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be [children] of God. We shall love [God] as [Jesus] does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. [Jesus] came to this world and became human in order to spread to other humans the kind of life He has - by what I call 'good infection'. Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else. -- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 177
Not too long before his death Jesus was giving some last minute instruction to his disciples. At one point he says to them, “I tell you the truth, that everyone who believes in me, will do the same works that I have done, and even greater works” (Jn 14:12).
In commenting on these words, Tony Campolo says he doesn’t think the “greater works” Jesus was talking about were turning water into wine or walking on water or raising the dead. “I can’t replicate the power acts of God in Jesus Christ,”, says Campolo, “but every time I perform an act of love in his name, I am imitating Jesus and he is saying, "Well done thou good and faithful servant."
We are called to become little Jesuses. As Christians around the world and around Chagrin Falls and around the Federated Church take that commission seriously, we have the potential to accomplish the “greater works” of which Jesus spoke.
Our good works do not make us good; rather they reveal the nature of our relationship with God. Or, as C.S. Lewis might put it, they reveal a people who have been infected by a good infection, who have been infected by the spirit of Christ. “By their fruit you will know them,” Jesus said in his sermon on the mount (Mt 7:16). The true nature of our relationship to God is seen in the spiritual fruit that results from that relationship.
A few years ago Kent Nerburn wrote a book entitled “Make Me an Instrument of your Peace: Living in the Spirit of the Prayer of St. Francis.” In the book he relates an incident that happened to him in Minneapolis in the early 1980's. He was working the overnight shift for the Yellow Cab company at the time.
Twenty years ago, I drove a cab for a living. It was a cowboy's life, a life for someone who wanted no boss. What I didn't realize was that it was also a ministry. Because I drove the night shift, my cab became a moving confessional. Passengers climbed in, sat behind me in total anonymity, and told me about their lives. I encountered people whose lives amazed me, ennobled me, and made me laugh and weep.
But none touched me more than a woman I picked up late one August night. I was responding to a call from a small brick fourplex in a quiet part of town. I assumed I was being sent to pick up some partyers, or someone who had just had a fight with a lover, or a worker heading to an early shift at some factory in the industrial part of town.
When I arrived at 2:30 a.m., the building was dark except for a single light in a ground floor window. Under these circumstances, many drivers would just honk once or twice, wait a minute, then drive away. But I had seen too many impoverished people who depended on taxis as their only means of transportation. Unless a situation smelled of danger, I always went to the door. This passenger might be someone who needs my assistance, I reasoned to myself.
So I walked to the door and knocked. "Just a minute", answered a frail, elderly voice. I could hear something being dragged across the floor. After a long pause, the door opened. A small woman in her 80s stood before me. She was wearing a print dress and a pillbox hat with a veil pinned on it, like somebody out of a 1940s movie.
By her side was a small nylon suitcase. The apartment looked as if no one had lived in it for years. All the furniture was covered with sheets. There were no clocks on the walls, no knickknacks or utensils on the counters.
In the corner was a cardboard box filled with photos and glassware. Would you carry my bag out to the car?" she said. I took the suitcase to the cab, then returned to assist the woman. She took my arm and we walked slowly toward the curb. She kept thanking me for my kindness. "It's nothing", I told her. "I just try to treat my passengers the way I would want my mother treated". "Oh, you're such a good boy", she said.
When we got in the cab, she gave me an address, then asked, "Could you drive through downtown?" "It's not the shortest way," I answered quickly. Oh, I don't mind", she said. I'm in no hurry. I'm on my way to a hospice". I looked in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were glistening. "I don't have any family left," she continued. "The doctor says I don't have very long." I quietly reached over and shut off the meter.
"What route would you like me to take?" I asked.
For the next two hours, we drove through the city. She showed me the building where she had once worked as an elevator operator. We drove through the neighborhood where she and her husband had lived when they were newlyweds. She had me pull up in front of a furniture warehouse that had once been a ballroom where she had gone dancing as a girl. Sometimes she'd ask me to slow in front of a particular building or corner and would sit staring into the darkness, saying nothing.
As the first hint of sun was creasing the horizon, she suddenly said, I'm tired. Let's go now." We drove in silence to the address she had given me. It was a low building, like a small convalescent home, with a driveway that passed under a portico. Two orderlies came out to the cab as soon as we pulled up. They were solicitous and intent, watching her every move. They must have been expecting her. I opened the trunk and took the small suitcase to the door. The woman was already seated in a wheelchair.
How much do I owe you?" she asked, reaching into her purse. "Nothing," I said. "You have to make a living," she answered. "There are other passengers," I responded. Almost without thinking, I bent and gave her a hug. She held onto me tightly. "You gave an old woman a little moment of joy," she said. "Thank you."
I squeezed her hand, then walked into the dim morning light. Behind me, a door shut. It was the sound of the closing of a life. I didn't pick up any more passengers that shift. I drove aimlessly, lost in thought. For the rest of that day, I could hardly talk. What if that woman had gotten an angry driver, or one who was impatient to end his shift? What if I had refused to take the run, or had honked once, then driven away? On a quick review, I don't think that I have done anything more important in my life.
We're conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments, Nerburn concludes, but great moments often catch us unaware - beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.
Elsewhere he writes about an image a teacher once offered him. The image is of, “...a great symphony in which we must all play our individual parts. None of us can hear the whole; none of us is suited to play all the parts. We must be willing to accept the limitations of the instrument we have been given and to offer up our voice as part of the great and unimaginable creation that is the voice of God.” (Make Me an Instrument, p6)
What is your role, what is my role in the orchestra? Or, to return to the Psalmist’s image: People of faith “... are like trees planted by streams of water, and their leaves do not wither and they yield their fruit in its season.