Walking In God's Promises

Isaiah 30:18-21

Scripture:

Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you;
    therefore he will rise up to show mercy to you.
For the Lord is a God of justice;
    blessed are all those who wait for him.

¹⁹ Truly, O people in Zion, inhabitants of Jerusalem, you shall weep no more. He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry; when he hears it, he will answer you. ²⁰ Though the Lord may give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself any more, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. ²¹ And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.” 

Sermon:

Introduction – As most of you know, I tend to have a normative form or style that I fall into when I preach. When I interviewed here with the search committee I even mentioned that I’m a teaching pastor. Or to put it another way, that my sermons are often educational in nature.

That’s part of who I am and what my ministry is about. But I also know that the work of a pastor is not limited to education. It’s not limited to the moment I get up here to deliver a profoundly rich exegetical understanding of some obscure biblical text and some hermeneutical extrapolation about how that’s relevant to your life. I certainly I hope I do that sometimes! 

But I’m also concerned with making time and space for other kinds of moments in our weekly time together. We are, after all, people and people are complicated and sometimes we don’t need to hear rich theology from the book of Romans, although that is certainly edifying and profitable. It’s a wonderful book.

Sometimes though, we need to be spoken to on another level. Sometimes we need to hear a voice from the scriptures that reaches out and gives us a hug and a word of wisdom. That’s what I think this morning’s passage does for us.

The passage I chose from Isaiah has a context and those things are important, but it’s also intuitively simple. And sometime that’s the kind of message we need to hear. Sometimes we just need to be told that we are loved and this morning God is telling you that you are loved.

So it is with this in mind that I want to switch things up and do things differently. This morning we’re going to take time to hear four stories from the NPR show Story Corps. In between these stories I’ll reflect a bit and maybe even ask you to turn to someone near to you and discuss what you may have heard or what’s sitting on your heart.

Our first story comes from my childhood and perhaps some special element of your life as well. There’s a very special Presbyterian minister who we all probably have some exposure to, even though he passed away in 2003. He was educated at Dartmouth College and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and testified before the U.S. Senate on behalf of public funding for children’s television. By now you may have guessed that I’m referring to Fred Rogers the host of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.

When I was growing up I didn’t have a lot of access to T.V. In the first grade, I would sneak over to a neighbor’s house to watch Power Rangers both because my family didn’t have cable and because I wasn’t allowed to watch it. But one show my family was always happy to see me in front of was Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.

This first story that we’re going to listen to is told by François Clemmons, the actor and singer who played Officer Clemmons on the show. In fact, François was the first African-American actor to have a recurring role on a kids TV series in the United States. So it with that in mind that we might perhaps hear something from his story:

["I was not excited about being Officer Clemmons at all."]

Some of the memories François just spoke of might bring back memories of our own. Of difficult times perhaps, or maybe a time when we had to empathize with someone else’s place. Or perhaps most miraculously, when we may have experienced that kind of expression of love and acceptance.

Though we may sometimes eat the bread of adversity and drink the waters of affliction, the Lord answers our cries and longs to be gracious and merciful to us. We are, and you are, loved.

This second story takes place in the course of a conversation between Janet Lutz, a hospital chaplain, and Lori Armstrong her friend.

["We go around and we bless the hands of all the people who work in the hospital."]

I’d like to ask you at this point to turn to someone near you and talk for a moment. Think about these two questions and then share with your neighbor:

·        How did those stories affect me?

·        How might I grow to take more care of moments like those?

Our third story might surprise you a little bit. It’s a conversation we’ll overhear between an older man, who’s possibly full of life experience, and a very young man who’s just now starting to turn his life around from some poor choices. I think you might find it a bit moving.

["At the age of 18, I didn't know what I was going to be doing with my life."]

I’m sure that one may have surprised all of you a little bit. I know that I chuckled when I heard it for the first time. But I never felt a sense of inauthenticity to it. Perhaps it’s my own background and childhood, but it spoke to me and some of the difficult times I went through as a kid.

Perhaps it’s a story that can help us reflect a bit on the last verse we heard from this morning’s scripture: “And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.’”

Finally, I want to conclude with a very powerful story between two brothers who came into such a relationship through unusual means. In my mind this next story illustrates the kind of love that Jesus talks about, particularly in the Sermon on the Mount.

["My American soldier became my Iraqi brother."]

Perhaps after hearing that story we can think about how we too might come to love those who we might think of as different or even enemies. We won’t go too deep into the idea today, but what does it mean when Christ calls us to love everyone, even our enemies. This story wasn’t even about enemies. It was about two men who overcame their prejudices and fears to become such close friends that they’d call each other “brother.” War has a funny way of cementing tight bonds between men. Perhaps it’s the horror and that drives our fundamentally social natures to seek something human amidst all the pain. Or perhaps it’s something else. I’m not in a position to speak to that, but I can say that this story illustrated the kind of relationship that can grow when we embrace love.

Conclusion:

I want to close this morning’s time of reflection with another reading of this morning’s scripture passage. May we be blessed with this reading from the prophet Isaiah.

Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you;
    therefore he will rise up to show mercy to you.
For the Lord is a God of justice;
    blessed are all those who wait for him.

¹⁹ Truly, O people in Zion, inhabitants of Jerusalem, you shall weep no more. He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry; when he hears it, he will answer you. ²⁰ Though the Lord may give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself any more, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. ²¹ And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”

Amen.