Sermon given at the Tappan Zee Conference Retreat, October 16, 2008

A Death in the Family

³In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. ⁵One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. ⁶When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” ⁷The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” ⁸Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” ⁹At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. Now that day was a sabbath.  (John 5:3-9)

This is one of the most interesting texts of the New Testament as far as I am concerned.  The healing of the paralyzed man has always fascinated me from my childhood.  In fact, I try always to visit the site in Jerusalem – a marvelous ruin at the Church of St. Anne, right outside the Sheep’s Gate.  I was always puzzled by how long a person could sit at a healing pool such as Bethesda.  I couldn’t imagine day after day, week after week, year after year, that this person could not find his way into the pool and be healed like so many others were.  Of course, he was lame and couldn’t get there, but even more interesting is how Jesus confronts him to ask if he really wants to be healed. 

Just like the lame man at the pool, many of us know what needs to be done in our life but do not want to do anything about it.  Even our flaws are in our comfort zone, and to change would demand too much of us.  So, we talk a good game but we really don’t back it up with actions.  We “talk the talk” but don’t “walk the walk”.  Thus, we limp along in life just getting by and ducking the responsibility that it would take to move towards health.  I guess we all need someone to lift us or to hold onto.  Keep that thought.

Since we are in the political season, I thought I would share a few stories about our presidents as seen through the eyes of Frederick Buechner from his book “The Yellow Leaves”.  Fredrick Buechner tells the story of the fist president he ever saw—Franklin D. Roosevelt.  It was in 1933 when Roosevelt was about fifty and Buechner was about six.

One day, as he tells the story, “My brother Jamie and I found ourselves in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel for some reason.  To use the John?  To come in out of the weather?  I suppose it might even be that somebody tipped my mother off, and she had brought Jamie and me along so we would have something to tell our grandchildren.

There were a lot of people milling around under the high ceiling, a lot of gilded mirrors and polished mahogany and deep carpeting, with bell boys in pillbox hats doing errands and men in morning coats standing behind the registration desk.  Then suddenly everybody seemed to start murmuring at once.  ‘He is coming!  He is coming!’ they were saying, and when I asked my mother about whom they were talking, she said, ‘They’re talking about the president.  President Roosevelt is coming.’

Even all these years later I can still remember the moment when the double doors of the elevator rumbled softly apart and there was Franklin D. Roosevelt framed in the wide opening.  He was standing between two men, the taller of whom, my mother whispered, was one of his sons.  Each of them held of him under one of his arms, and I could see that if they let go of him, he would crumple to the ground on legs as flimsy as the legs of a Raggedy Anne or Andy doll.  He was the most important man in the Mayflower Hotel.  He was the most important man in the world.  But I could see with my own eyes that if he didn’t have those two men to help, he would be helpless.

The day President Roosevelt died, a few years after our paths crossed at the Mayflower, I was PFC, holding down a nothing job of my own in the message center of the infantry replacement training center at Fort McCleland, Alabama.

Every hour or so I was supposed to deliver whatever new message there might be to all the top brass in the Headquarters Building, and as I made my rounds that day, I was the one who, in office after office, broke the news about the president. Nobody quite believed me; he’d been around so long.  I didn’t quite believe myself.

What I learned for the first time from that glimpse I had of him in the elevator is that even the mightiest among us can’t stand on our own.  Unless we have someone to hold us our flimsy legs buckle.”

What I find interesting about this, growing up in a staunchly democratic household, listening to my grandma say over and over again how FDR was such a great president and got us through the Great Depression and gave strength to us as a nation, is that here was a man who arguably saved a nation but couldn’t stand or walk on his own two feet.  Sort of different from the man lying by the pool for 39 years, waiting to be healed or just considering the idea.  Without knees that worked, Roosevelt stood tall and gave a nation strength.

Most of you are aware that my wife Kathy’s brother died.  He had many problems, including being a paranoid schizophrenic, and suffered from deep depression and anxiety.  It would take too long to tell you of all the intricacies that made him the very unhappy person he was.  He was very contentious, never taking advice, and was conflicted on many levels—not simply with his parents or Kathy and myself… but most of all with himself, and drove his father crazy.

He was in constant contact with us calling us every other day.

Then, a few weeks ago a strange thing happened.  There was a long silence.  At first it seemed like a respite and then it got to be more eerie and even scary.  Could the unspeakable have happened?  After a few days we called him and got his machine… but that was all… After many attempts and no call backs we decided to visit him in New Jersey to see what was up.  Arriving at the house, we found the car in the driveway and mail overflowing from the mailbox.  Right away we knew something was wrong.  Kathy put the key in the door; neither of us wanted to enter.  Then we discovered that we didn’t have the right key.  What should we do?  We went to the police station.  The police broke into the house and told us to stay outside, but the smell of death was filling our nostrils.

The officer came outside to tell us that Fred was dead.  He said in his monotone voice what he has probably said many times before, “I am sorry for your loss”.  Both our eyes welled up with tears, and Kathy grabbed me and said her legs were weak, almost like they were going to buckle underneath her.  My knees didn’t feel so strong either.  We started to cry.  We cried for Fred, we cried for ourselves, we cried for the whole sad situation.

At times like this you feel helpless, like the lame man on the side of the pool at Bethesda.  You feel paralyzed, unable to move, because the news is so bad.

As I thought about what I was going to say to all of you today, I could throw a few clichés at you like “We are all wounded healers” or “We are all flawed leaders” or “We are the frozen chosen”, but I will spare you that and just say, “We are all a little lame”.  In the same leadership position as an old president of the 1930s, we may not be framed by elevator doors, but we are framed by our own church doors that we walk through every day as servants of our Lord.

At the same time, we may be just as crippled as that old president or, for that matter, as that old man lying by the pool at Bethesda.  The challenges we face seem to be enormous in the secular world.  The message we proclaim seems to fall upon deaf ears enough times that it demoralizes us.  In the situations of ministry in which we find ourselves, we feel all too often inadequate.  So, like that old man by the pool or the old chief executive of the past who took over after the first stock market collapse, we, too, can feel a bit weak-kneed and even paralyzed. 

Today we are on retreat.  A brief moment to restore our souls, to find our sea legs, or just our legs, to go forward with the vows we once took at God’s altar.  I have been at this game a long time like many of you and somehow the picture of FDR being held by each arm as he marches into the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel is something I can relate to.  We all need to be held, if just for comfort and reassurance that we are loved.  We all are dependent on people around us that hold us up; we all need something to hold on to but at the same time realize that there are many people in our life that we are holding up.  The responsibility is great.  We need a miracle.  Perhaps that is why this story is so poignant.  Because, in the end, the man does walk and even carries his own mat.

Somehow, in the miracles of Jesus and in the stories he tells, you don’t just get the bare minimum; you discover something about yourself and your own potential.  You, believe it or not, can be an inspiration, a role model, a doer of great good, and a leader as profound as the one who said to millions of people, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.  We, like twelve weak-kneed disciples, discover the miracle of love.  We proclaim that it is stronger than hate, and even death won’t have the last word.

I have grown fond of this passage:

“For his anger is but for a moment,

and his favor is for a lifetime.

Weeping may tarry for the night,

but joy comes with the morning.

                    —Psalm 30:5”.

In the end, anger, bitterness, sadness, and weeping will be overshadowed by the break of day and a new morning. Sometimes, as I hear Jesus speaking to his disciples and us, I hear him saying that we are about being a new creation and that our ministries need to be ushering in a new morning to those who despair, who have lost hope, and who need to be renewed with love.

Finally, that brings me to another presidential story - ‘tis the season.  Let me share with you Buechner’s reflections on President Dwight Eisenhower.  Buechner taught at Exeter and was chaplain there in the 1950s.  President Eisenhower’s grandson David was in several of his classes.  Buechner describes him as a pleasant, intelligent boy who avoided the pitfalls of being related to someone famous.  He also says that his mother-in-law was a great Eisenhower fan and thought that he was so spiritual.  Spiritual?  Well, that did not seem to fit with Buechner’s understanding of this person who was friendly, in an army uniform with ribbons pinned on it.  He felt that Eisenhower spent too much time on the golf course with people like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.  Buechner felt that he was lacking in moral courage, especially when Joe McCarthy attacked Ike’s old friend, General George C. Marshall, and during the civil rights crisis when he could have been a stronger influence. 

However, lo and behold, Dwight Eisenhower was the commencement speaker at Exeter the spring that David graduated.  Beforehand, there was a luncheon in which this old president who, during his life, had been a five-star general in charge of the allied forces in Europe, become president of the US for two terms, and was recovering from a heart attack, shook Buechner’s hand with his bald head and wrinkled lines on his pink face.  Buechner was caught unaware and unprepared for his smile.  It was not a public-relations smile, a vote-getting smile, a smile he worked up for the occasion; it was a smile that held nothing back and asked nothing back.  He even says that it was so beautiful that it lit up the room and almost justified his mother-in-law’s term “spiritual”.  Buechner says simply this: “After all those years of bad-mouthing him and not voting for him, I knew that, if the occasion arose, I would follow him into the jaws of death.”

A smile – there are many songs about smiles.  I always think of Charlie Chaplin when that old chestnut is brought out – “Smile even though your heart is breaking”.  I am also reminded of a few words that I utter every Sunday.  They go like this: “May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”  What I am really saying is, “May the Lord smile on you.”  It’s a wish, it’s a blessing, it’s what we call a benediction.

I guess it’s worth something when God smiles on you, and maybe it’s that smile we need to share when we smile.  A genuine smile, not a forced one, or a pretentious one, or a phony one, but one that makes us a blessing to others.

Sermon on Worry - May 25, 2008 @ St. John's Lutheran Church in Mamaroneck, NY

Matthew 6: 24-34

One of the more interesting campaign buzzwords is the term “culture of fear”. By this, proponents mean that we as Americans are filled with fear even though we are the most powerful nation on earth with one of the highest standards of living. Yet it appears we are one of the most fearful nations, too, waiting for Al Qaida to attack, worrying about gasoline going to $8 a gallon, rising food prices, not to mention health care costs etc. There is a lot that we worry about.

Worry is an interesting topic. There are lots of drugs that deal with anxiety disorders, there are various quasi-spiritual/exercise prescriptions for dealing with high stress and anxiety (yoga, aromatherapy, etc.). There is a whole industry built around antidotes to worry in all of its forms.

I will always remember the character in the irreverent and outrageous MAD magazine, Alfred E. Neuman, who used to say, “What, me worry?”. That was his slogan. However, everyone is struggling with the issue of worry and it gets even more serious when you consider the recent news of Senator Ted Kennedy who has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor at the age of 76. That diagnosis has been heard by thousands of Americans year after year and it strikes fear in your heart in the most devastating way. When you get hit by a bad diagnosis, fear runs rampant and ripples far beyond you to all those around you. At the announcement of Kennedy’s illness, senators began to cry.
Cancer does not respect age or economic status.

Actually, one of the central themes in Jesus’ teachings of the Sermon on the Mount runs totally counter to the aspects associated with worry, fear and anxiety. He says, “Do not worry about your life, what you should eat or what you should drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing… Can any of you by worry add a single hour to your span of life?” He goes on to tell us to look to the birds of the air and to the lilies of the field who seem to be worry-free as well. There is always a knee-jerk response from me when I hear this passage such as “Is Jesus really living in this world?” or “He has probably never heard of my problems”. On the other hand, I have to say that he is right. Worry never seems to get us anywhere in the end. It has been said that “today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday”.

Despite Jesus’ admonition to us not to worry, we still do. Worry is a sin. It is part of our human condition that we have this impulse because we, by nature, lack faith. It is the permanent Christian struggle to have faith even though skepticism, cynicism and apathy derail us on a daily basis. Paradoxically, doubt is a part of faith, and without it we could not speak in terms of faith. Our cry for certainty is never answered until we discover faith. Living by faith is always the key—it is the answer, but it has been tried and found difficult.

Recently we said good-bye to Hamilton Jordan, the “wiz kid” who, at the age of 26, ran a successful campaign for Jimmy Carter for governor as well as for president. He became the president’s chief of staff. He was a gifted strategist and a powerful person to deal with, but that all changed, including his life, when he began the fight for his life two decades ago upon his diagnosis with cancer. He became a tireless advocate for cancer research and spent countless hours counseling friends and strangers fighting the same illness. His life and energy turned in a different direction, no longer concerned with the ugliness of politics, but with the ugliness of cancer. He wrote a book entitled “No Such Thing as a Bad Day”. He was asked how he could write a book with such a title given all that he went through. Jordan put it this way: “I was counseling a young man who had a brain tumor and I called him one day and asked him, ‘Are you having a good day?’, and he said, ‘Well, my wife is 32 years old, my kids are four and six, and my doctor tells me I have about two months to live. There is no such thing as a bad day.’” He said it was that attitude toward life that he tried to reflect and write about in this book.

In the end, we are creatures who worry, who are fearful, and who struggle to deal with the issues that scare us in this thing called life. Like the disciples we pray for more faith and try to live with the confidence that, as the sun rises every day, we are not alone in this universe.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the oldest living Nobel Prize recipient, was asked whether he fears death and his answer is: “No, I am not afraid of death any more. When I was young the early death of my father cast a shadow over me -- he died at the age of 27 -- and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final milestone of one’s existence”.

He wrote this: “What about the main thing in life? I’ll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusionary… property and position, all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and is confiscated in one felt night. Live with a steady superiority over life… don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: The bitter doesn’t last forever and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms bend, if both eyes see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well.”

Of course, you can put me in the worry club, along with many others, but the above quote has had a profound effect on my life. I have had to rub my own eyes to see differently and purify my own heart to remove the needless concerns that can devour my energy. It all comes down to this: “Prize above all else those who love you and who wish you well.” That is the good news that Jesus is trying to tell us.

In the end, there is a loving presence with us in our journey. We live under the canopy of God’s forgiving grace and love. We need to remember Jesus’ words “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

MEH